.

Dr Alan Barnes

Lecturer

Phone number
+44 (0)121 204 3466

Email
a.barnes@aston.ac.uk

Room number
MB 273

Profile
I was educated at the King's School, Grantham along with Isaac Newton (although he was in an higher year than me!).

I obtained a BSc in Pure and Applied Mathematics at Imperial College, London in 1968, and a PhD in Theoretical Physics (also at IC) in 1972, working on Classical General Relativity and Cosmology under the supervision of Professor GJ Whitrow. In 1973-4 I gained a Postgraduate Certificate of Education at Bingley College in West Yorkshire.

From 1971-3 I was a Turner & Newall Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; this was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Trinity College in Dublin from 1974-77. I took up a lectureship in Mathematics at Aston University in 1977, transferring to Computer Science in 1987.

In 2006 I retired from full-time work and am currently employed on a part-time basis (1 day per week) in Computer Science.

Teaching activity

This year I assist in the teaching of:

I also supervise a number of final year individual projects. In previous years I have also taught:
  • CS1260: Mathematics for Computer Science
  • CS3250: Distributed Systems
  • CS2130: Programming Language Concepts and Paradigms
  • CS1110: Introduction to Systematic Programming in Ada
List of CS Academic Programmes >>

Research interests

My research interests are in Computer Algebra and its Applications and also in Classical General Relativity and Cosmology. Current projects include:
  • A Power Series Package for Reduce (TPS Source Code)
  • Applications of Computer Algebra to General Relativity
  • Perfect Fluid solutions of Einstein's Field Equations
  • Symmetries & Collineations in Spacetimes

Selected publications

  • Killing Tensors and Conformal Killing Tensors from Conformal Killing Vectors. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 20, 1929-1942,(2003).
  • Ricci Collineations in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetimes. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 19, 393-404,(2002).
  • Some Restrictions on the Symmetry Groups of Axially Symmetric Spacetimes. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 18, 5511-5520,(2001).
  • On the symmetries of the Edgar-Ludwig metric. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 18, 5287-5291,(2001).
  • On Stephani's rotating dust solutions. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 16, 919-926,(1999).
  • Purely Magnetic Spacetimes. In the Proceedings of 27th Spanish Relativity Meeting (Encuentros Relativistas Españoles), Alicante, Spain, 2003-09-11.
  • A comment on a paper by Carot et al.. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 17, 2605-2609,(2000).
  • Univariate Power Series Expansions in Reduce. In the Proceedings of 1990 International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation, Tokyo, Japan, 1990-08-20.
  • Symmetries of the Stephani universes. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 15, 3061-3070,(1998).
  • A Comment on a Paper by Dadhich and Patel. General Relativity and Gravitation, 30, 515-517,(1998).
A more comprehensive list of Dr Barnes' publicatons >>