It is a wonderful surprise and honour to be awarded the IMA Gold Medal. It is especially poignant for me because one of the people who most influenced my career was my supervisor Alan Tayler, who was the recipient (in 1982) of the first medal, jointly with another of my role models, James Lighthill. Moreover, the theme of my talk is an activity that would have been very different had it not been for the vision of these two people. In 1965, James Lighthill was in part responsible for a report, sponsored by the Royal Society, in which it was noted how strongly UK applied mathematics was rooted in theoretical mechanics, and the report suggested that maybe it was time to broaden the range of applications. Alan Tayler, applied mathematician and rugby player, and his colleague Leslie Fox, numerical analyst and golf player, seized on this suggestion and proposed to the Science Research Council to hold a series of "Study Groups". These were quite unlike the then British Theoretical Mechanics Colloquia and their nucleus was the presentation, by a handful of industrial researchers, of open problems to a group of open-minded academic mathematical scientists. These academics were initially all from Oxford but the resulting constraints in expertise were soon recognised, especially in Nottingham, and help in all areas of mathematical expertise was soon forthcoming from around the country. What really made the Study Group concept work was that, after the presentations, the academics were left to gravitate to those problems they found to be of greatest interest. Their ideas were then reported back on the final day, as indicated in the representative programme in Figure 1. Finally, and crucially for the industrial impact, an accessible technical report was sent to each industrial participant within a few weeks of the Study Group. I must add that the intensity of a Study Group can only be appreciated by the participants, who are frequently moved to rivalry, and even abuse, but, more frequently, to the utterance of Colemanballs, made famous in [10]. More or less everything I now have to say concerning stimulation has resulted from the Study Group concept.
