Student
John Fernley

John graduated from the University of Oxford in 2016 with an MMath in Mathematics, specialising in Probability and Combinatorics.

John graduated from the University of Oxford in 2016 with an MMath in Mathematics, specialising in Probability and Combinatorics. He undertook summer projects at Oxford and at York, and continues to be interested in the scaling limits of Integrable Systems. Otherwise, John enjoys listening to music and playing chess badly.

Research project title:
Discordant voting on evolving scale-free networks

Supervisor(s):
Marcel Ortgiese, Peter Mörters

Project description:
Similarly to the Contact Process, voting models describe competing spread of two ‘opinions’ on a graph of interacting ‘voters’. Cooper et al. in their 2016 paper ‘discordant voting processes on finite graphs’, explored the expected consensus time for a variety of voting models on extremal graphs. These discordant voting models could be seen as a bridge between the classical voter model and the Graph Fission evolving voter model of Durrett. John was interested in finding a universal description of the model’s lifetime on scale-free heterogeneous networks, in particular with Chung-Lu type edge models. These models can then be made to evolve in time by vertex updating, and his next objective would be to show that this speeds consensus.