The London Institute for Mathematical Sciences (LIMS, also known as the London Institute) is Britain's only independent research centre in theoretical physics and mathematics. The institute was established as a research-only environment, distinct from the teaching-and-research model of universities, with the aim of allowing scientists to spend their time on research rather than teaching and administration.
In 2026, Times Higher Education reported that the entrepreneur and philanthropist Ben Delo had pledged £20 million to LIMS as part of a campaign to build a £60 million endowment.
History The London Institute was founded in 2011 by the American physicist Thomas Fink with the encouragement of Caltech's Head of Physics, Tom Tombrello. It received early grants from DARPA and the EU’s research framework programme.
In 2019, it was awarded Independent Research Organisation status by UK Research and Innovation, becoming the first independent research centre in the physical sciences to be allowed to compete with universities for funding from the seven research councils.
In 2021, its researchers moved into the Royal Institution at 21 Albemarle Street in Mayfair. They now occupy rooms that were once the private living quarters of Sir Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday and Sir William Bragg, among others.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the LIMS created the Arnold and Landau Fellowships, named after the Ukrainian mathematician Vladimir Arnold and the Russian physicist Lev Landau, consisting of ten three-year full-time positions..
In 2022, the institution's website was nominated for Best Science Website at the Webby Awards.
Research The London Institute conducts research in mathematics, theoretical physics and related mathematical sciences. Its research pages group the institute's work into broad themes including "Mathematics that unifies", "The elegant universe", "Life, learning and emergence" and "AI-assisted discovery".
Its researchers have published papers on statistical physics in Nature Reviews Physics; algebraic geometry in the Journal of High Energy Physics; graph theory in the European Journal of Combinatorics; and network theory in Physical Review Letters. In 2024, researcher Oleksandr Gamayun’s paper on topological solitons became LIMS's first to be published in Nature.
In 2021, the UK government announced the launch of Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), a new science agency designed to support projects that may create "a paradigm shift in science". Following the agency's creation, LIMS compiled a list of the 23 Mathematical Challenges of our time, inspired by David Hilbert's list of 23 challenges published in 1900, 17 of which have been solved or partially resolved; the LIMS list was published in full in The Times.
Leadership and governance
The director of LIMS is the physicist Thomas Fink.. Its trustees include Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute; the author and entrepreneur Talulah Riley; the investor Florian Schuster; and the entrepreneur and philanthropist Ben Delo. In addition to its trustees, it has a group of governors, who include Amit Jain and Pinar Emirdağ.
Funding LIMS has funded its physics research almost entirely though private investors and EU and US grants, rather than through access to a dedicated stream of domestic core public funding.
As a non-university institute, the LIMS does not receive student fees or the annual core funding the British government gives to universities. Instead it has been funded by research grants from the EU's Horizon 2020, the European Innovation Council, DARPA, the US Department of Defense, the Ministry of Defence, the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK. Industry collaborations include investments from firms in strategy, biotech and AI.
In 2025, Delo funded the Ben Delo Fellowship at the London Institute, whose first incumbent is the physicist Juven Wang. In 2026, Delo pledged an additional £20 million to LIMS.
References
External links London Institute for Mathematical Sciences