London Institute for Mathematical Sciences

The London Institute was founded in 2011 by the American physicist Thomas Fink with the encouragement of Caltech's Head of Physics, Tom Tombrello. It received early grants from DARPA and the EU’s research framework programme. In 2019, it was awarded Independent Research Organisation status by UK Research and Innovation, becoming the first independent research centre in the physical sciences to be allowed to compete with universities for funding from the seven research councils. In 2021, its researchers moved into the Royal Institution at 21 Albemarle St in Mayfair. They now occupy rooms that were once the private living quarters of Sir Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday and Sir William Bragg, among others. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the LIMS created the Arnold and Landau Fellowships, named after the Ukrainian mathematician Vladimir Arnold and the Russian physicist Lev Landau, Consisting of ten three-year full-time positions.. In 2022, the institution's website was nominated for Best Science Website at the Webby Awards. == Research ==

The London Institute does research in theoretical physics and mathematics. Its work spans four themes: Mathematics that unifies; The elegant universe; Life, learning and emergence; and the Theory of human enterprise. Its researchers have published papers on statistical physics in Nature Reviews Physics; algebraic geometry in the Journal of High Energy Physics; graph theory in the European Journal of Combinatorics; and network theory in Physical Review Letters. In 2024, researcher Oleksandr Gamayun’s paper on topological solitons became LIMS's first to be published in Nature. In 2021, the UK government announced the launch of Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), a new science agency designed to support projects that may create "a paradigm shift in science". Following the agency's creation, LIMS compiled a list of the 23 Mathematical Challenges of our time, inspired by David Hilbert's list of 23 challenges published in 1900, 17 of which have been solved or partially resolved; the LIMS list was published in full in The Times. == Leadership and governance ==

The director of LIMS is the physicist Thomas Fink. Its trustees include Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute; the author and entrepreneur Talulah Riley; the investor Florian Schuster; and the entrepreneur and philanthropist Ben Delo. In addition to its trustees, it has a forum of governors, who include Amit Jain and Pinar Emirdağ. == Funding ==

LIMS has funded its physics research almost entirely though private investors and EU and US grants, rather than through access to a dedicated stream of domestic core public funding. In 2025, Delo funded the Ben Delo Fellowship at the London Institute, whose first incumbent is the physicist Juven Wang. In 2026, Delo pledged an additional £20 million to LIMS. == References ==