William Lionheart

William R. B. Lionheart
Born
William Robert Breckon
EducationUniversity of Warwick (B.Sc.); University of California, Berkeley, Oxford Brookes University (Ph.D.)
Known forElectrical impedance tomography; inverse problems; tomographic reconstruction
Scientific career
FieldsApplied mathematics; inverse problems; tomographic imaging
WorkplacesUniversity of Manchester; Oxford Brookes University; UMIST
Michael Pidcock, David C. Barber

William Robert Breckon Lionheart is a British applied mathematician specialising in inverse problems, tomographic imaging, and low‑frequency electromagnetic sensing. He is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester.[1] His research spans theoretical, numerical, and practical aspects of inverse problems with applications in medicine, industry, security, and non‑destructive testing.

Early life and education

Lionheart attended Larkmead School in Abingdon-on-Thames as a child, then studied mathematics at the University of Warwick, receiving a 1st class hons B.Sc. degree.[1] He completed his Ph.D. at Oxford Brookes University in 1990 under the supervision of Michael Pidcock working on problems in Electrical Impedance Tomography.[2]

Academic career

Lionheart began his academic career at Oxford Polytechnic (later Oxford Brookes University), where he worked as a lecturer and senior lecturer. In 1999 he joined UMIST as Lecturer in Applied Mathematics, becoming Reader in 2002. Following the merger that created the modern University of Manchester, he was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics in 2005.[1]

Lionheart worked extensively on Electrical Impedance Tomography, especially in a biomedical setting. His contributions include theoretical results on uniqueness of solution for boundary shape [3] and anisotropic conductivity,[4][5] numerical algorithms for reconstruction,[6] and reconstruction software [7] including being a founder member of the EIDORS project.

Lionheart worked on X-ray tomography reconstruction especially for airport baggage screening, developing algorithms for a widely used fast tomography system with Rapiscan Systems.[8] He sits on the Executive Board of the Collaborative Computational Imaging (CCPi) project [9] that develops the Core Imaging Library (CIL) A python framework for tomographic imaging .

In 2023 Lionheart led a programme at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge entitled "Rich and Nonlinear Tomography - a multidisciplinary approach" . He led held an EPSRC project 'Rich Nonlinear Tomography for advanced materials' a joint project between Manchester, Oxford and Cambridge. In this context Rich Tomography means rather than creating a simple scalar field one images a vector or tensor field, or a spectrum, or orientation density function. Examples include polarimetric tomography of magnetic fields,[10] X-ray diffraction tomography for strain imaging,[11] and strain tomography with polarized light [12]

Magnetic induction tomography is closely related to EIT but a system of coils is used apply low frequency magnetic fields to image the conductivity of a body. As well as his interest in MIT for medical imaging[13] Lionheart has worked on applications in industrial process monitoring, such as flow of molten steel.[14] Lionheart and collaborators have also worked on the theory the location and recognition of landmines using low frequency inductive methods [15] as well as unexploded ordnance.[16] With Prof Tony Peyton, Lionheart founded a laboratory for developing land mine detection technology funded by Sir Bobby Charlton's charity "Find a Better Way" [17]

Awards, fellowships and prizes

Lionheart was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1983 which enabled him to study at the University of California, Berkeley.[1] In 2009 he accepted the Martin Black Prize[18] on behalf of the team that devised `GREIT', a unified approach to 2D linear EIT reconstruction of lung images.[19][20] Lionheart's team won the defence and security category at the Engineer’s Technology and Innovation Awards for their work on the Rapiscan RTT baggage scanner.[21] During 2013 and 2014 Lionheart visited Per Christain Hansen at the Technical University of Denmark, with an Otto Mønsted visiting Fellowship.[22] In 2015 Lionheart was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research merit Award for Novel Methods in Tomography imaging: "Rich tomography" and fast dynamic imaging.[23]


Name

Early publications appear under the name W. R. Breckon.[24] By the early 1990s his papers appear under the name W. R. B. Lionheart.[25] ORCID also lists both names as author aliases.[26]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "William Lionheart". ORCID. 17 July 2026. Retrieved 19 July 2026.
  2. ↑ "William Robert Breckon Lionheart". Math Genealogy Project. Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  3. ↑ Lionheart, W R B (1998-02-01). "Boundary shape and electrical impedance tomography". Inverse Problems. 14 (1): 139–147. Bibcode:1998InvPr..14..139L. doi:10.1088/0266-5611/14/1/012. ISSN 0266-5611. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  4. ↑ Lionheart, W. R. B. (2004). "Geometric Methods for Anisotropic Inverse Boundary Value Problems". New Analytic and Geometric Methods in Inverse Problems. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 337–351. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-08966-8_12. ISBN 978-3-642-07379-3. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  5. ↑ Gaburro, Romina; Lionheart, William R B (2009-04-01). "Recovering Riemannian metrics in monotone families from boundary data". Inverse Problems. 25 (4) 045004. Bibcode:2009InvPr..25d5004G. doi:10.1088/0266-5611/25/4/045004. ISSN 0266-5611. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  6. ↑ Lionheart, William R B (2004-02-01). "EIT reconstruction algorithms: pitfalls, challenges and recent developments". Physiological Measurement. 25 (1): 125–142. arXiv:physics/0310151. doi:10.1088/0967-3334/25/1/021. ISSN 0967-3334. PMID 15005311. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  7. ↑ Adler, Andy; Lionheart, William R B (2006-05-01). "Uses and abuses of EIDORS: an extensible software base for EIT". Physiological Measurement. 27 (5): S25–S42. Bibcode:2006PhyM...27S..25A. doi:10.1088/0967-3334/27/5/S03. ISSN 0967-3334. PMID 16636416. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  8. ↑ Thompson, William M; Lionheart, William R B; Morton, Edward J; Cunningham, Mike; Luggar, Russell D (2015-05-01). "High speed imaging of dynamic processes with a switched source x-ray CT system". Measurement Science and Technology. 26 (5) 055401. Bibcode:2015MeScT..26e5401T. doi:10.1088/0957-0233/26/5/055401. ISSN 0957-0233. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  9. ↑ "People". Executive Board. CCPi. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  10. ↑ Desai, Naeem M; Lionheart, William R B; Sales, Morten; Strobl, Markus; Schmidt, Søren (2020-04-01). "Polarimetric neutron tomography of magnetic fields: uniqueness of solution and reconstruction". Inverse Problems. 36 (4): 045001. arXiv:1903.10884. Bibcode:2020InvPr..36d5001D. doi:10.1088/1361-6420/ab44e0. ISSN 0266-5611. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  11. ↑ Lionheart, W R B; Withers, P J (2015-04-01). "Diffraction tomography of strain". Inverse Problems. 31 (4) 045005. Bibcode:2015InvPr..31d5005L. doi:10.1088/0266-5611/31/4/045005. ISSN 0266-5611. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  12. ↑ Lionheart, William, and V. Sharafutdinov. "Reconstruction algorithm for the polarization tomography problem with incomplete data." Imaging Microstructures: Mathematical and Computational Challenges. American Mathematical Society, 2009. 137-160.
  13. ↑ Soleimani, Manuchehr; Lionheart, William R. B (2006). "Absolute Conductivity Reconstruction in Magnetic Induction Tomography Using a Nonlinear Method". IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. 25 (12): 1521–1530. Bibcode:2006ITMI...25.1521S. doi:10.1109/TMI.2006.884196. ISSN 0278-0062. PMID 17167989.
  14. ↑ Soleimani, Manuchehr; Lionheart, William R. B.; Peyton, Anthony J. (2007). "Image Reconstruction for High-Contrast Conductivity Imaging in Mutual Induction Tomography for Industrial Applications". IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement. 56 (5): 2024–2032. Bibcode:2007ITIM...56.2024S. doi:10.1109/TIM.2007.895598. ISSN 0018-9456.
  15. ↑ Ledger, Paul David; Lionheart, William R.B. (2018-05-30). "Generalised magnetic polarizability tensors". Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences. 41 (8): 3175–3196. arXiv:1705.00580. Bibcode:2018MMAS...41.3175L. doi:10.1002/mma.4809. ISSN 0170-4214. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  16. ↑ Ledger, P. D.; Lionheart, W. R. B. (2022-12-31). "Minimal Object Characterizations Using Harmonic Generalized Polarizability Tensors and Symmetry Groups". SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics. 82 (6): 2057–2079. doi:10.1137/22M1471547. ISSN 0036-1399. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  17. ↑ "Sir Bobby Charlton backs opening of international landmine research centre in Manchester". Retrieved 2026-08-03.
  18. ↑ "Martin Black award". Physiological Measurement. Institute of Physics. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  19. ↑ Adler, Andy; Arnold, John H; Bayford, Richard; Borsic, Andrea; Brown, Brian; Dixon, Paul; Faes, Theo J C; Frerichs, Inéz; Gagnon, Hervé; Gärber, Yvo; Grychtol, Bartłomiej; Hahn, Günter; Lionheart, William R B; Malik, Anjum; Patterson, Robert P; Stocks, Janet; Tizzard, Andrew; Weiler, Norbert; Wolf, Gerhard K (2009-06-01). "GREIT: a unified approach to 2D linear EIT reconstruction of lung images". Physiological Measurement. 30 (6): S35–S55. Bibcode:2009PhyM...30S..35A. doi:10.1088/0967-3334/30/6/S03. ISSN 0967-3334. PMID 19491438. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  20. ↑ Daniel Cochlin (2010-09-29). "Manchester mathematician picks up medical paper prize" (Press release). Manchester. UK: University of Manchester.
  21. ↑ McKeegan, Alice (2013-01-11). "A clear winner: The high-speed new scanner for airports". Manchester Evening News. Manchester Evening News.
  22. ↑ Tonsberg, Claus (2013-09-19). "11 new international visiting professors" (Press release). Manchester. UK: DTU.
  23. ↑ "Royal Society announces recipients of prestigious Wolfson Research Merit Awards". News from the Royal Society. The Royal Society. 2015-03-12. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  24. ↑ Breckon, W. R. (1988). "On uniqueness in electrical impedance tomography". IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics. MR 0933790.
  25. ↑ Lionheart, W. R. B. (1991). "Uniqueness results in EIT". Inverse Problems. MR 1435872.
  26. ↑ "ORCID profile: William R. B. Lionheart". Retrieved 2026-07-05.
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