Skip to content

Toggle service links

STEM Faculty

Meet the people who make up STEM Faculty.

Dan Rust

Dan Rust

Senior Lecturer in Applied Mathematics

View OU profile (opens in a new tab)
mathematics-and-statistics

Professional biography

I am a Senior Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the Open University. After receiving an MMath from Manchester University in 2012, I obtained my PhD from the University of Leicester in 2016 under the supervision of Alex Clark. I then undertook a 4 year position in Bielefeld Unviersity as a postdoctoral researcher as a member of the Aperiodic Order group of Michael Baake. I joined the Open University from there in May 2020.

I am the student research experience coordinator for the School of Mathematics & Statistics. For more information about these schemes and how to apply, see here or contact me directly by email.

Research interests

My research is focused on symbolic dynamics, as well as the topology, dynamics and spectral theory of aperiodic tilings and quasicrystals. Specific topics include:

  • The dynamics of tilings and bi-infinite sequences - especially those arising from substitutions on finite and infinite alphabets, S-adic systems and random substitutions, as well as cut and project sets.

  • The representation of tiling spaces as inverse limits of branched manifolds and their Čech cohomology

  • Applications of aperiodic order to other areas of mathematics - specifically the study of combinatorial game theory, dimension groups and Diophantine approximation

I also have interests in general topological dynamics and algebraic topology as a whole. I have a particular fondness for the applications of algebraic topology to knot theory and braids.

The above image is a Barge Diamond complex which was automatically generated by the program Grout.

Grout

Developed by myself and Scott Balchin, Grout is a free user-friendly program for Windows and Mac which can calculate various topological and combinatorial properties of symbolic substitutions.
For an explanation of the computations that Grout performs, we have provided documentation on the arXiv.
You can download Grout from Github.

Teaching interests

I am involved in the production and presentation of several undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Mathematics, including MST124 - Essential Mathematics 1, MST326 - Mathematical Methods and Fluid Mechanics, MST374 - Computational Applied Mathematics, M823 - Analytic Number Theory I and M840 - Dissertation in Mathematics (Topic: Aperiodic Tilings and Symbolic Dynamics).