Mark Wildon

Mark Wildon is a professor of mathematics at the University of Bristol and a contributing mathematician to FrontierMath, an Epoch AI benchmark for advanced mathematical reasoning. He completed a 2004 Oxford PhD on modular representations of symmetric groups under Karin Erdmann, co-wrote a Lie algebras textbook and co-edited a combinatorics survey. His career included a UK-Lebanon Atiyah Fellowship and a secondment at Bristol's Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research. In 2026, he published a bijective proof of a q-Pfaff-Saalschütz identity with applications to quantum groups, and he is an honorary visiting professor at Royal Holloway.

Now at: University of Bristol and Royal Holloway University of London
Works: 102
Citations: 468
h-index: 11
Badges: Wayfarer

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

2004

An Oxford doctorate

In 2004, he earns a PhD at the University of Oxford with a dissertation on modular representations of symmetric groups, supervised by Karin Erdmann.
2006–2008

A Lie algebras textbook

With Karin Erdmann, he coauthors Introduction to Lie algebras, a 254-page Springer textbook published in 2006. Mark Hunacek reviews the book in The Mathematical Gazette in July 2008.
2013

Editing a combinatorics survey

At Royal Holloway, University of London, he co-edits Surveys in Combinatorics 2013 with Simon R. Blackburn and Stefanie Gerke for Cambridge University Press. The volume collects survey articles from the Twenty-Fourth British Combinatorial Conference, organised by Royal Holloway in Egham, Surrey, in July 2013.
April 2020

An Atiyah Fellowship

In April 2020, he receives one of the inaugural UK-Lebanon Atiyah Fellowships, established by the London Mathematical Society, to visit the Centre for Advanced Mathematical Sciences in Lebanon. His main research area is representation theory of the symmetric and general linear groups.
2021–2022

Secondment at Heilbronn

During the academic year 2021/22, he works on secondment at the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research, attached to the University of Bristol. Researchers there spend half their time on their own mathematical research and half on problems of interest to GCHQ and the NCSC. His earlier work at the institute leads to a classified impact case study in Royal Holloway's Research Excellence Framework 2021 return.
November 2024

Co-authoring FrontierMath

In November 2024, he coauthors FrontierMath, Epoch AI's benchmark of hundreds of original, challenging mathematics problems developed with over 60 mathematicians from universities across more than a dozen countries. At its November 2024 release, state-of-the-art AI models solve fewer than 2% of its problems, and he is a contributing mathematician.
March 2026

A bijective proof

In March 2026, he coauthors A new bijective proof of the q-Pfaff-Saalschütz identity with applications to quantum groups, published in the European Journal of Combinatorics.
As of October 2026

Professor at Bristol

He is a professor in the University of Bristol's School of Mathematics and an honorary visiting professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. His interests are in algebraic combinatorics and representation theory, especially the representation theory of the symmetric groups and related algebras.