Chris Smyth Author & Editor

James McKee is Professor of Pure Mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is an expert on algorithmic and computational methods in number theory, particularly for elliptic curves, polynomials as well as Pisot and Salem numbers. In recent years his interests have become more combinatorial, and with his students and Smyth he has used structures related to graphs to study algebraic integers through their eigenvalues.

Chris Smyth, a professorial fellow in Number Theory at the University of Edinburgh, has a long-standing interest in Mahler measure. This dates from his PhD thesis, where he studied Lehmer’s conjecture for nonreciprocal integer polynomials. He discovered the first known closed formula for a 2-dimensional Mahler measure involving an L-function, leading to a deep study of such formulae by Boyd, Deninger, Rodriguez Villegas and others. He invented the explicit auxiliary function method, which applies semi-infinite linear programming to number-theoretic problems, including to the Mahler measure of totally real polynomials.