Gratitude to the University of Oxford faculty.

For proving Fermat's Last Theorem after decades of quiet persistence, and for showing a generation that the hardest problems are worth a lifetime of love.

For deep work on the geometry of moduli spaces, and for becoming the first woman to hold Oxford's historic Savilian Chair, opening a door many will now walk through.

For revealing the hidden geometry inside groups and symmetry, and for serving mathematics generously as a leader and superb expositor of hard ideas.

For studying the mathematics of symmetry and then giving that beauty away to the whole world through books and broadcasts, so millions can feel the music of the primes.

For patiently testing our theories of gravity against the whole sky, and for helping everyone see how the cosmos grew from its first light.

For bringing the tools of physics to DNA, evolution, and deep learning, and for showing that curiosity across disciplines is a gift, not a distraction.

For inventing ways to weigh intact proteins in flight and reading their structure from it, and for a path from teenage lab technician to Oxford's first female Professor of Chemistry.

For learning to rewrite the sugars and proteins that run living cells, and for building the chemical tools that let us see and shape biology precisely.

For decades of foundational work on how many agents can reason and cooperate, and for explaining AI to the public with rare honesty and warmth.

For building the tools that prove software and AI will behave, and for insisting that as machines make more decisions, we must be able to trust them.

For charting the deep boundary between what computers can and cannot solve quickly, and for leading Oxford's computer scientists with clarity and care.

For teaching machines to see, founding Oxford's Visual Geometry Group, and shaping the field of computer vision that now touches everyday life.

For putting machine learning to work at the hospital bedside and on the phone in your pocket, so patients are watched over more safely and can manage their own health.

For teaching computers to read ultrasound so that expert care can reach mothers and babies anywhere, and for championing engineering as a Fellow and officer of the Royal Society.

For advancing the mathematics behind how machines understand images, and for keeping that research anchored to the real needs and ethics of the people it serves.

For building the Bayesian machinery that turns genomic data into medical insight, and for helping medicine reason honestly under uncertainty.

For reading the story of human ancestry and disease written in our DNA, and for founding the Big Data Institute so that data can serve human health.

For proving that black holes are a real prediction of Einstein's theory, work honored with the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, and for a lifetime of fearless imagination.

For decades probing dark matter, neutrinos, and the true shape of the universe, and for asking honest questions of even our most cherished cosmological assumptions.

For pioneering protein film electrochemistry to watch enzymes at work, illuminating how nature makes and uses energy and pointing toward cleaner fuels.

For discovering how our cells sense and adapt to oxygen, work honored with the 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine and now opening new hope in anemia and cancer.

For designing the vaccine that helped the world through a pandemic and choosing to make it affordable to all, a quiet act of science in service of humanity.

For a lifetime chasing vaccines for the diseases that burden the world's poorest, including the long-sought breakthrough against malaria that will save countless children.

For leading the trials that proved vaccines safe and effective for the world, and for a career devoted to protecting children from typhoid, meningitis, and more.

Thank you, Irene Tracey, a 'made in Oxford' neuroscientist now leading the whole University, for steering one of the world's great institutions with scientific rigor and human warmth.

Thank you, Gill Aitken, for bringing a distinguished government-lawyer's judgment to the Registrar's chair, holding the quiet machinery of Oxford steady so its scholars can do their work.

Thank you, Dan Grimley, for championing Oxford's humanities as a living cultural powerhouse, and for making the case that music and the arts are essential, not ornamental.

Thank you, Timothy Power, for leading Oxford's Social Sciences Division while keeping alive a scholar's deep curiosity about democracy and institutions in Brazil and beyond.

Thank you, Mette Morsing, for stepping in to steady Said Business School and for insisting that good business and genuine sustainability belong in the same sentence.

Thank you, Lorna Hutson, for revealing how law, rhetoric, and the imagination met on the Renaissance stage, and for reading Shakespeare's world with such invention.

Thank you, Armand D'Angour, for bringing the lost sound of ancient Greek music back to life and composing odes in ancient Greek, making the classical world sing again.

Thank you, Timothy Garton Ash, for chronicling Europe's freedom and its fragility with a historian's eye and a witness's heart, from 1989 to today.

Thank you, Sarah Foot, the first woman to hold Oxford's Regius Chair of Ecclesiastical History and to serve as Dean of Christ Church, for illuminating faith and community in early England.

Thank you, Lyndal Roper, the first woman to hold Oxford's Regius Chair of History and a 2026 Holberg laureate, for illuminating the Reformation, gender, and the human texture of the past.

Thank you, Tim Williamson, for showing generations that philosophy can be as precise as mathematics, and for pressing on the hardest questions about knowledge and its limits.

Thank you, Jeff McMahan, for bringing careful moral philosophy to bear on war, life, and death, and for holding a 400-year-old chair with rigor and conscience.

Thank you, Dame Hermione Lee, for making biography an art and founding the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, teaching us to read a whole life with patience and grace.

Thank you, Robin Lane Fox, for storytelling that carried Alexander and the ancient world to millions of readers, and for the rare gift of scholarship worn lightly.

Thank you, Diarmaid MacCulloch, for telling the three-thousand-year story of Christianity with such scholarship and generosity that millions came along for the journey.

Thank you, Sandy Fredman, for founding the Oxford Human Rights Hub and for a lifetime advancing equality, dignity, and labour rights across the Commonwealth and the world.

Thank you, Timothy Endicott, the founding Dean of Oxford's Law Faculty, for probing how language, vagueness, and law meet, and for building the faculty that carries that inquiry forward.

Thank you, Sir Paul Collier, for a career spent understanding the poorest billion and the places left behind, and for insisting economics should serve real communities.

Thank you, Paul Klemperer, for turning auction theory into public value, and for showing that elegant economics can design fairer markets in the real world.

Thank you, Ngaire Woods, for founding and building the Blavatnik School of Government, and for training a new generation to govern wisely across a divided world.

Thank you, Simon Wren-Lewis, for explaining macroeconomics to the public with clarity and courage, and for defending evidence over slogans in hard economic times.

Thank you, Colin Mayer, Said Business School's first professor, for reimagining the corporation around purpose, and for arguing that business should be a force for people and planet.