mathematics

Gil McVean

Gil McVean is a mathematics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Gil McVean rather than just read about it. In short: Gilean Alistair Tristram McVean (born February 1973) is a professor of statistical genetics at the University of Oxford, fellow of Linacre College, Oxford and co-founder and director of Genomics plc. He also co-chaired the 1000 Genomes Project analysis group.

Key takeaways

Gil McVean belongs to mathematics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Gil McVean to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Gil McVean from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Gilean Alistair Tristram McVean (born February 1973) is a professor of statistical genetics at the University of Oxford, fellow of Linacre College, Oxford and co-founder and director of Genomics plc. He also co-chaired the 1000 Genomes Project analysis group.

Education

From 1991 to 1994, he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford. He completed his PhD in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge supervised by Laurence Hurst in 1998.

Career and research McVean completed postdoctoral research at the University of Edinburgh from 1997 to 2000, supervised by Brian and Deborah Charlesworth. From 2000 to 2004, he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Statistics at Oxford, where he has also been a University lecturer in Mathematical Genetics since 2004. He was reappointed in 2009 until retirement age. In October 2006, he was appointed professor of statistical genetics at the University of Oxford. McVean's research focuses on population genetics, statistics and evolutionary biology including the International HapMap Project, recombination rates in the human genome and the 1000 Genomes Project. McVean developed a statistical method to look at recombination rate which helped to identify PRDM9 as a hotspot positioning gene. In 2014, with Peter Donnelly, McVean co-founded Genomics plc, a genomics analysis company, as a corporate spin-off of the University of Oxford. In 2017, he was a founding director of the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford.

Honours and awards In 2006 McVean was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2010, McVean was awarded the Francis Crick Medal and delivered that year's lecture entitled "Our genomes, our history". In 2012, he was awarded the Weldon Memorial Prize. In 2013, he presented a talk TEDxWarwick entitled A Thousand Genomes a Thousand Stories. In May 2014, McVean was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation. McVean was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci).

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Gil McVean

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Gil McVean claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In mathematics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Gil McVean before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Gil McVean ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Gil McVean

In research: Gil McVean appears in mathematics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Gil McVean in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Gil McVean is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1973 births, 21st-century statisticians, Alumni of the University of Edinburgh, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Gil McVean outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Gil McVean in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Gil McVean means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Gil McVean out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Gil McVean in simple terms?

Why does Gil McVean matter?

Because it connects several mathematics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Gil McVean?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Gil McVean.