Colloquia
Since the last newsletter, we have hosted the 1996 mathematics colloquium at Massey University. My first attendance at a Colloquium was at Auckland University in 1968, when I had just begun my Junior Lectureship at Massey. Although many memories merge easily with later colloquia, I do remember clearly my only meeting with Professor Henry Forder, who took a lively interest in the proceedings, even in his retirement. I also recall, those days, that the meeting also served the Statisticians and the academic Computer Scientists. I remember John Butcher describing his bold introduction of computing into his first year Applied Mathematics course with about 1000 students, with a locally written language that had yet to be implemented!
The colloquia, as a seed to the disciplines, have spawned separate conferences for the Statisticians, Operations Researchers, Computer Scientists and Mathematics Teachers. We also see more specialist conference such as in Combinatorics and in Applied Mathematics. Is there still a place for a broad spectrum meeting? This was indeed a puzzle for the organising committee as this year's colloquium had not attracted sufficient registrants at the closing date, to meet the budget. We had been faced by other difficulties, the introduction of semesters in some New Zealand universities had lead to the change of date, from the traditional autumn to midwinter. (Fortunately the Palmerston North weather was not unkind that week.) The common two weeks available, brought us into a clash either with the Australian Mathematical Society's Annual Meeting in Adelaide, or with the ACCMC meeting in Sydney and ICME in Madrid. We chose to avoid the former. Also we were sandwiched between two BIG colloquiua. The 1995 colloquium was integrated with the Aitken conference in Dunedin, and the 1997 colloquium will be incorporated with the Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society as a joint convention.
Although we could feel disappointed at the low participation this year from some of the universities, we remember that the colloquium serves New Zealand mathematicians, not the other way around. Indeed, I personally have attended only about half of the colloquiua that had been available to me during my time in New Zealand.
However I do value the contacts that we make across the universities and across the specialities
of mathematics. In the contributed talks, most presenters are aware that the audiences contain many non specialists, and make their work more accessible to the generalists. This is good.
As I had been on the organising committee of the three previous colloquia hosted by Massey, it was difficult to avoid being given the task once more. I had an enthusiastic committee to assist in the planning and implementation of the meeting. We had a few setbacks, particularly with the late withdrawal, for health reasons, of our projected ANZIAM invited Lecturer, Professor Ren Potts. We were particularly grateful to John Harper for his substitution at very short notice.
A very enjoyable task was to be a member of the judging panel for the Aitken prize. We had twelve students who entered for the prize this year. Although it is difficult to make judgements across different fields, and although the standards this year were high, it was possible to identify two students who made very professional presentations, setting standards that many of their teachers would be pleased to attain. The initiative of the Society to establish these awards is commendable. It certainly acts as an encouragement for our research students to become involved in the colloquium and to make good quality presentations.
Farewell to Matt Varnish
With the recent sad loss of Derrick Breach (see centrefold, this issue) alias Matt Varnish, the Newsletter will no longer contain the cryptic mathematically flavoured crosswords that have been our unique back page feature for 17 years. Matt's devious puzzles have been a challenge for the cryptic minded readers, and to me personally have offered puzzles and challenges that have bemused and often defied me.
This issue contains the solutions to his final contribution, No. 48 "Give us a number". I fear Matt's contribution is irreplaceable, and this leaves me with the problem of finding an appropriate replacement feature so that we can continue with a distinctive back page. I would welcome suggestions from the readership as to what they might wish to see in this place.
Mike Hendy
Editor