Joseph Zelezniak

Biography

Joseph I. Zelezniak is from Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa. He graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BSc in Pure Mathematics and Physics and a BSc Honours in Mathematics, and subsequently spent 2026 doing an MSc in Mathematics there. He is currently a Commonwealth Master’s Scholar at Imperial College London, where he is pursuing an MSc in Pure Mathematics. His research interests lie in harmonic analysis, extremal problems on spheres, sphere packing and analytic approaches to geometry. His UCT master’s research studied the Turán extremal problem for spherical caps. He has co-authored two peer-reviewed papers in algebra: On hollowness in multiplicative lattices, published in Algebra Universalis, and Strongly hollow ideals: Complete join-primality, dual irreducibility, and local obstructions, published in the Journal of Algebra and Its Applications. Joseph graduated from his Honours degree with a 97% result and received the prize for Best Postgraduate Presentation at the 2025 South African Mathematical Society Congress. He represented South Africa internationally in debating for four years and later chaired the UCT Debating Union. He also writes poetry, has written and directed one-act plays, and plays football recreationally. At Oxford, he hopes to pursue a DPhil focused on harmonic analysis and geometric extremal problems.