Rate My Professor Tim Candy

Dr. Tim Candy is a Senior Lecturer in pure mathematics within the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Otago, a position he has held since 2018. Previously, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Bielefeld, Johns Hopkins University, and Imperial College London. Candy earned his MSc from the University of Canterbury and his PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His academic career has been marked by a focus on advancing understanding in pure mathematics, particularly through rigorous analysis of complex equations.

Candy's research specializes in partial differential equations and harmonic analysis, with a strong emphasis on the global dynamics of solutions to nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations. These include models from mathematical physics such as the Dirac equation, wave maps equations, and the Maxwell-Klein-Gordon equation. His investigations explore how solutions evolve over large times, decoupling into linear or dispersive components alongside nonlinear phenomena like focusing, blow-up, or soliton behavior. He also studies restriction estimates, especially bilinear and multilinear forms, which connect to Strichartz estimates and are essential for analyzing nonlinear dispersive systems. Candy's contributions appear in leading journals, including "Concentration compactness for the energy critical Zakharov system" (Discrete & Continuous Dynamical Systems, 2024), "The Zakharov system in dimension d ≥ 4" with S. Herr and K. Nakanishi (Journal of the European Mathematical Society, 2023), "Global wellposedness for the energy-critical Zakharov system below the ground state" (Advances in Mathematics, 2021), "Multi-scale bilinear restriction estimates for general phases" (Mathematische Annalen, 2019), and "Global existence for an energy critical nonlinear Dirac equation in one dimension" (2011). In 2019, he was awarded a Marsden Fund grant of $300,000 for his project on the global behaviour of nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations. At Otago, he teaches courses including MATH 140: Fundamentals of Modern Mathematics 2, MATH 201: Real Analysis, MATH 4MI: Measure and Integration, and MATH 4MF: Mathematical Finance.