Thomas Powell Home ⚬ Papers ⚬ Events ⚬ CV

I am a Reader in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath, and a member of the Mathematical Foundations of Computation group. I am interested in mathematical logic and its applications in both mathematics and computer science.

Before coming to Bath, my research took me to a several different places, including the Logic Group at TU Darmstadt and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques.

My email address is: trjp20 AT bath DOT ac DOT uk

For some alternative pictures of me see the Oberwolfach Photo Collection.

research interests

My background is in pure mathematics, and I began my career specialising in proof theory and computability theory. Like many mathematicians with a predisposition towards logic, I eventually found a home in a computer science department. Most of my research revolves around the application of logic to different areas of mathematics and computer science, ranging from functional analysis to the theory of programming languages. For more information, see my publications.

current work

In the last few years, my research has been dominated by probability theory and stochastic optimization. Here are three very recent papers that give some indication of what I'm thinking about at the moment:

• My paper on martingale convergence (doi, arXiv), one of the first in a series of applications of proof theory in probability by me and others (joint with Morenikeji Neri, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 2025).
• A recent preprint on stochastic processes (arXiv) in which we unify several of the main techniques for establishing convergence of stochastic algorithms (joint with Morenikeji Neri and Nicholas Pischke, submitted, 2025).
• A case study in proof mining (doi, pdf), which I only list because it contains some wild speculation on how proof assistants and automated reasoning could be utilised in the context of applied proof theory and stochastic optimization (Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, to appear, 2025+).

some activities and roles

I co-founded and continue to organise the Southern and Midlands Logic Seminar, currently a collaboration between Bath, Birmingham, Queen Mary, Sussex and UCL. We have been supported by the London Mathematical Society since we began in early 2023, and we are now also supported by the British Logic Colloquium.

I am Principal Investigator for the EPSRC project Imperative Programs from Proofs.

I am currently Deputy Head of Department (Research) in Computer Science at Bath.

During the pandemic, I co-founded and was a committee member of the Proof Theory Virtual Seminar. Slides and videos for most of the talks, which together represent a nice snapshot of proof theory in 2021–2022, can be found here.

phd students and postdocs

• Davide Barbarossa (Postdoc, started January 2024)
  
• Ben Langton (PhD student, started October 2024)
  Co-supervisor with James Davenport
• Alex Wan (PhD student, started October 2023)
  Main supervisor
• Morenikeji Neri – former PhD student, now a postdoc in the Logic Group at TU Darmstadt
  Thesis: Applications of Proof Theory to Limit Theorems and Stochastic Processes (defended March 2025)
  Main supervisor
• Franziskus Wiesnet – former PhD student, now a researcher in the Institute of Discrete Mathematics and Geometry at TU Wien
  Thesis: The Computational Content of Abstract Algebra and Analysis (defended August 2021)
  Unofficial supervisor, joint with Peter Schuster and Helmut Schwichtenberg

contact

trjp20 AT bath DOT ac DOT uk

+44 (0) 1225 384085

1 WEST 4.61
Department of Computer Science
University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY
United Kingdom

Webpage last modified December 2025