AGRESEARCH
Ken Jury has retired as General Manager of the Dairying Research Corporation. A full appreciation of Ken's involvement with statistical and mathematical science in New Zealand appears as the lead article of the June 1996 newsletter of the NZSA. He was responsible for biometrics and computing at Ruakura from 1969 until 1979, when he became Director of Animal Research, and was also appointed to the Council of the University of Waikato. He was involved in setting up the Waikato Centre for Applied Statistics, and chaired the local organising committee for the 1992 International Biometric Conference at Waikato.
AgResearch maintained a high profile at the 1996 New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium. Four papers featured AgResearch authors:
Kao: A herd-based model of Tb control in cattle.
Kopetschny, Lambert, Louie, Springett and Wake: Dynamical systems model of earthworms and litter.
Gandar, Hall and Louie: A continuum mechanics approach to determining the cellular velocity field within a wool follicle.
Roberts: Integral equation models in epidemiology.
Mick Roberts
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UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND
SCHOOL OF MATHEMATICAL AND INFORMATION SCIENCES
Ivan Reilly is away for July, visiting the following:
1. Centre for Mathematics Education, Open University, with which our Mathematics Education Unit has a link sponsored by the British Council.
2. The Dean and Faculty of Science at the University of Oviedo, Asturias, Spain. That university has an exchange agreement with the University of Auckland. (In fact, our chair of Spanish is the Prince of Asturias Chair.)
3. Two of his co-authors, Jesus Ferrer and Valentin Gregori, of Valencia, Spain.
4. The International Congress on Mathematics Education, ICME8, Sevilla, Spain.
5. The University of California main office for the Education Abroad Program, Santa Barbara.
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
Professor Clark Thomborson (from the University of Minnesota) has joined the Department. Mr Michael Dineen from (Victoria University, BC) and Dr Bak Khoussainov (from Columbia University) have been appointed as Lecturers.
Dr Jeremy Gibbons has resigned, and he is now lecturing at Oxford Polytechnic, in England.
Professor Cris Calude is on leave in Europe.
Seminars
Dr Mark Titchener (Tamaki), "Seeding trees from a coded message".
Dr Peter Fenwick, "Block sorting text compression".
Dr James Noble (University of Technology, Sydney), "Abstract program visualisation with objects".
Miro Kraetzl (Defence Science and Technology Organisation), "Analysis, modelling, control and management of LANs and WANs in tactical and strategic military situations".
Dr Christian Collberg, "Automatic compiler re-targeting".
Dr P. S. Thiagarajan (SPIC Science Foundation, Madras), "Linear-time temporal logic over product state spaces".
Professor Brian Wyvill (University of Calgary), "Metamorphosis of Boolean compound soft objects: Implicit Surface meets CSG".
Professor Charles J. Colbourn (University of Waterloo), "Erasure Codes".
Dr Hans Guesgen, "Towards anytime constraint satisfaction".
Dr Bill Havens (Simon Fraser University), "Asynchronous Backtracking".
Dr Xinfeng Ye, "Multicast primitives for mobile hosts".
Professor Bob Doran, "Recent developments in computer architecture".
Dr Antonio Albano (University of Sydney), "The Fibonacci language: an approach to merge relational and object technology".
Dr John Hosking, "Do you see what I mean?".
Professor Andre Nies (University of Chicago), "Logical questions about free groups".
Dr Jeremy Gibbons, "Drawing dotted and dashed lines (and recording intentions)".
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS
At the 1996 NZ Mathematics Colloquium at Palmerston North, Associate-Professor M K Vamanamurthy was presented with one of the two NZ Mathematical Society Research Awards for 1996, with the accompanying citation: "For his prolific and far-reaching work in analysis and topology, especially for his contributions to the theory of quasiconformal mappings and special functions; contributions that are characterized by both analytic ingenuity and geometric insight."
Bridget Jones, Deputy Principal of Parua Bay School (Whangarei), has been awarded a teacher fellowship by the Royal Society of New Zealand, to spend 6 months from April 1996 working with Mike Thomas on factors related to the use of calculators and computers in primary school mathematics classrooms.
A Lectureship was advertised and it attracted 133 applicants, several of whom are very highly qualified.
The 1996 NZ Mathematics Colloquium, held at Massey University in July, was attended by 25 staff and students from this Department. Lectures
were given by:
Jianbei An, "Quasi-radical subgroups of general linear groups".
John Butcher, "A generalization of Runge-Kutta methods".
Jiling Cao, Ivan Reilly and M K Vamanamurthy, "Comparison of convergences for multifunctions".
David Chen "The problems of the form BU' = a(U), and a transistor amplifier example".
Marston Conder, "Cyclic groups of automorphisms of Riemann surfaces".
Colin Fox, "Mathematics on Antarctic sea ice" (Invited Address).
Andrew Hill, "Specializations of integrable systems".
Vivien Kirk, "Mutual synchronization of the flashing of populations of fireflies".
S Kopetschny, G Lambert, K Louie, J Springer and G C Wake, "Dynamical systems model of earthworms and litter".
David McIntyre, "Some applications of logic".
Alex McNabb, "Frictional heating of a descending plate".
Anjana Singh, "The numerical solution of initial-value problems".
Garry Tee, "Integer sums of powers of elliptic functions (mod p), for prime p".
M. K. Vamanamurthy, V V Aseev and M Vuorinen, "Quasiadditive properties and biLipschitz conditions".
Graeme Wake, "Cell-growth models with dispersions".
At the 1996 Conference of the Australian Mathematical Society, held at Flinders University of South Australia in July, Vaughan Jones gave an Invited Address on "Planar Algebras", Graeme Wake chaired the ANZIAM Council meeting, and Garry Tee presented a lecture on "Integer sums of powers of elliptic functions (mod p) for prime p". In the following week, Vaughan Jones attended a Conference on Mathematical Physics at the University of Adelaide, where he gave a public lecture on `Knots'.
At the conference on Geometric Group Theory, held at ANU in July, Marston Conder gave an Invited Address on "Group actions and regular maps on non-orientable surface", and Gaven Martin gave an Invited Address on "The geometry of Kleinian Groups". Warren Moors was a plenary speaker at the 25th Spring Conference of the Union of Bulgarian Mathematicians, at Kazanluk. John Butcher gave lectures at several conferences in Brazil, Europe and USA during his leave, and Margaret Morton gave lectures at conferences in Beijing and Sydney during her leave. Jianbei An attended the International Group Theory Symposium at Beijing in May. Gaven Martin gave an invited lecture at a conference on Conformal Geometry at Trondheim, and he and Norm Levenberg both gave invited lectures at a meeting of the Swedish Mathematical Society at Umea.
John Butcher, Gaven Martin, Vivien Kirk, Margaret Morton, Boris Pavlov and Bill Barton have returned from leave. Mark Wilson has gone on leave to attend a conference on Ring Theory in Hungary, and Tim Marshall is in Australia for June and July.
Recent visitors included Professor John R. Giles (University of Newcastle), Professor Robert D. Russell (Simon Fraser University), Professor Q.I. Rahman, (Université de Montreal), Professor Jiang Shouli (Shandong), Professor Len Bos (University of Calgary), Professor Zbigniew Slodkowski (University of Illinois), and Professor Mikhail Gromov (IHES, Paris).
The Open University/BBC Education TV series "Seeing through Mathematics" was made as part of the Open University's new foundation course in mathematical modelling. The first program had an audience of over half a million, when screened in the UK in February 1996. The final program "Refining the View" (30 minutes long) features items on the construction of bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong, monitoring the survival rate of the Hector's dolphin population (around Banks' Peninsula), Antarctic sea-ice (with Colin Fox interviewed about his research), and the fluctuation in the level of Lake Wakatipu.
The 1997 Summer Workshop will be held, again at Tolaga Bay, in 1997, January 3 to 11, with the theme of discrete groups and hyperbolic manifolds. The invited speakers include Martin Bridson (Oxford), David Epstein (Warwick), Andre Haefliger (Geneva), Linda Keen (CUNY), Colin MacLachlan (Aberdeen), Walter Neumann (Melbourne) and David Singerman (Southampton).
Isaav Newton Connection
Graeme Wake, Professor of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (of the University of Auckland), is an invited participant and contributor at the forthcoming (August/September) research programme on the Mathematical Modelling of Plankton Population Dynamics at the Isaac Newton Institute at Cambridge, UK.
The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences is an international research centre, sponsoring visitor programmes in topics across the whole spectrum of mathematical research. Modelling via mathematics has occurred (traditionally) in physics - hence the personification via Isaac Newton - and now extends into chemistry, biology, medicine and agriculture. Almost no area of science has not benefitted from the modelling process.
This six-week programme on plankton modelling is designed to play a key role in ocean-atmosphere dynamics. Their effects range from alterations on a local scale of the structure of the sea-surface temperature and mixed layer depths, to ocean basin-wide emissions of potentially important climatological gases. Plankton comprise the lowest trophic level in the oceanic food chain, and are crucial to the maintenance of world fisheries. The programme is designed to bring together mathematical and numerical modellers from around the world, together with biological oceanographers to review, improve and develop models, addressing particularly the need to understand the space and time distribution of plankton behaviour and its relationship with the physical dynamics of the ocean-atmosphere systems, for example, the algae blooms.
The invited participants include 40 from Europe, North America and New Zealand. Experts from these countries have been involved in modelling this area of food-chain dynamics affecting fisheries resources. Graeme Wake has been involved in applying advanced non-linear dynamical methodology to these problems so as to identify thresholds between grossly different physical outcomes.
Seminars
Dr Kumar Vetharaniam (Tamaki), "Mathematical modelling of animal growth".
Dr Andrew Reztsov (Tamaki), "A method for construction of cubature formulae for integration and use in mathematical modelling".
Rowan Killip, "Wave attenuation in narrow channel".
John MacCormick, "Using semigroup theory to calculate the determinants of certain kinds of operators".
Dr Shaun Cooper (Massey-Albany), "The Macdonald identities and some extensions".
Alexei Boiarkine, "On stochastic perturbations and averaged evolution".
Grant Emms (Acoustics Research Centre), "Control of sound transmission through an aperture using active sound absorption techniques: a theoretical investigation".
Professor Thomas Kaijser (Linköping University), "On stochastic perturbations of iterations of circle maps".
Professor John R. Giles (University of Newcastle), "A differentiability characterisation of Banach spaces not containing l1".
Professor Marston Conder, "Bounds for the number of symmetries of a compact non-orientable surface".
Professor Q. I. Rahman (Université de Montreal), "Zeros of complex polynomials", and "On a polynomial inequality of Erdös related to that of Bernstein".
Professor Boris Pavlov, "Convolutions of singular measures and new spectral branches of few-body Hamiltonians and Liouvillians".
Professor James Cannon (Brigham Young University), "Squaring rectangles; a discrete Riemann Mapping Theorem", "Recognising Kleinian groups combinatorially".
Professor Tamas Erdelyi (Texas A&M University). "Littlewood-type problems on polynomials with -1,0,1 coefficients".
Professor Mikhail Gromov (IHES, Paris), "The geometry of groups".
Professor Rick Millane (Purdue University), "Cylindrically averaged spectra of distorted lattices".
Dr Robin Knight (Oxford University), "Compact monotonically normal spaces".
Kerry Richardson, "Metrisability of resolved spaces".
Professor Elmer E Rosinger (University of Pretoria), "Algebraic and order-completion methods for solving nonlinear PDEs, and a solution to Hilbert's Fifth Problem".
Dr Steve Smith (University of Illinois at Chicago), "Subgroup complexes".
Dr Warren B. Moors, "Norm attaining functionals on C(T)"
Garry J Tee, "Integer sums of powers of elliptic functions (mod p) for prime p".
John MacCormick, "On a class of Markov chains on general state spaces".
Dawn Jones, Judy Paterson, Sue Noble, Rosheen Gray and Edie Mak (Senior College of New Zealand), "Winner's Edge - educating senior secondary students".
Dr Don Kreher (Michigan Technological University). "Hunting t-Designs with t > 3".
Professor Robert D Russell (Simon Fraser University), "Adaptive numerical methods for solving PDEs, and their applications".
Professor Gordon Knight (Massey-Albany), "Critical factors in the implementation of the new mathematics curriculum".
Alastair McNaughton (Tamaki), "Solution of an LP by the Rebound Method".
Professor Gaven Martin, "Some problems in conformal geometry".
Dr Paul Bonnington (Tamaki). "Obstructing outer-cylindrical embeddings of a graph".
Dr Robyn Zevenbergen (Griffith University), "Mathematics practice: Its role in the construction of social difference".
Professor Len Bos (University of Calgary), "Kergin interpolation".
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DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS
Dr Russell Millar has joined the Statistics group in the Division of Science and Technology at Tamaki as Senior Lecturer. Russell was previously at The University of Otago. He is a graduate of Auckland and did his PhD at the University of Washington, Seattle. His major research interest is in the application of statistics to fisheries and fishing.
Alastair Scott has gone on leave until 1997, and Alan Lee is Acting Head of Department. Arden Miller has gone on leave, and Constance Brown has returned from leave.
At the Sydney International Statistics Congress in July, members of this Department presented the following papers:
Brian Eastwood, "Optimal sample allocation in clinical trials".
Ross Ihaka, "The R language".
Alan Lee, "Modelling scores in the 1995 Winfield cup".
Paul Murrell, "The Simplisp graphics package".
Chris Triggs, John Curran, John S Buckleton and A J Walsh, "The energy problem in forensic glass analysis: a divisive approach".
David Scott, "A comparison of computable bounds for Markov chain Monte-Carlo rates of convergence".
Andrew Balemi and Arden Miller also attended that Congress.
Seminars
Dr Thomas Kaijser (Linköping University), "On a class of Markov chains on general state spaces".
Dr M. Xie (National University of Singapore), "Statistical process control for high-quality processes".
Dr Chris Heyde (Columbia University and ANU), "Avoiding the Likelihood: New Methods of Quasi-Likelihood for statistical Inference".
Professor David R. Brillinger (Berkeley), "Statistical analysis of the tracks of moving particles".
Dr Günther Sawitzki (University of Heidelberg), "Extensible Statistical Software".
Dr Murray A. Jorgensen (University of Waikato), "A dynamic EM algorithm for estimating mixture proportions ".
Dr John Buckleton (ESR), "DNA Statistics and the trial of O. J. Simpson".
Dr James Currall (University of Glasgow), "Computers in Statistics Teaching - a Scottish Perspective".
Dr Gita Mishra (University of Newcastle), "On conducting a large trans-disciplinary health study".
Dr Rick Mugridge, "Report on the Java Developers Conference".
Garry J. Tee
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UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS
Dr Darlene Heuff (British Columbia) has recently been appointed to a lectureship in applied mathematics and will arrive at the start of next year. We are also advertizing for a lectureship or senior lectureship in statistics. Details can be found elsewhere in this issue.
Derrick Breach will be honoured by a commemorative issue of the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics.
Thomas Kaijser, who was kindly loaned to us for a year from the University of Linköping, has gone back to Sweden.
Andrew Hill obtained his PhD and has now moved north. Our loss is Auckland's gain.
The contract for the new Mathematics and Computer Science building has now been awarded and in return we have a fine new hole where a lawn used to be. In time this may transform to something more like the architect's plans.
Technology moves ever onwards. We now have our very own paper shredder which copes with items such as damaging love letters, poor reviews of papers, doctors' refusals to agree to allergies to students, job refusals at other institutions...
Research Reports
No. 137 "Invariant Imbedding and Hyperbolic Heat Waves", David Wall and Peter Olsson, Calmers University of Technology, Sweden.
No. 138 "Multiple Minimum Coverings of Kn with copies of K4-3", C C Lindner, Auburn University and Anne Penfold Street, University of Queensland.
No. 139 "Interval and bounding Hessians", Chris Stephens.
No. 140 "On the Existence of Topological Ovals in Flat Projective Planes", G Steinke, B Polster (University of Adelaide) and N Rosehr (Universität Kiel).
No. 141 "Diagonalization of Matrices over Regular Rings", P Ara, K R Goodearl, K O'Meara and E Parado.
No. 142 "Separative Cancellation for Projective Modules over Exchange Rings", P Ara, K R Goodearl, K O'Meara and E Parado.
No. 143 "General Time Reversible Distances with Unequal Rates Across Sites", P J Waddell (Massey) and M Steel.
No. 144 "The Number of Nucleotide Sites Needed to Accurately Reconstruct Large Evolutionary Trees", M Steel, L A Székely and P Erdös (Hungary).
Seminars
Thomas Kaijser (Linköping University), "On the computation of the Kantorovich metric for images".
Professor Rainer Loewen (University of Braunschweig), "Ovals in topological projective planes".
Professor Rainer Loewen (University of Braunschweig), "Piecewise linear maps of Rn or Piecewise linear maps of Euclidean space".
Professor Lou Fishman (Iowa State University), "Reformulation of the Helmholtz Equation with Application to Direct and Inverse wave Propagation Modelling".
Dr Paul Smith (University of Dundee), "Modelling Electronic and Electromagnetic Systems".
Dr Rick Beatson (Canterbury), "Pieces of Radial Basis Functions".
Professor Ray Mines (New Mexico State University), "What exactly is a PID (Principle Ideal Domain)?".
Professor Wes Johnson (University of California, Davis) , "Case Deletion Diagnostics".
Professor Chuck Vinsonhaler (Connecticut), "Calculus Reforms - amazing or amusing?"
Professor Chuck Vinsonhaler (Connecticut), "Are (U.S.) mathematicians good problem solvers?"
Dr David Robinson, "Some mathematical paintings by Derrick Breach"
Professor Chuck Vinsonhaler (Connecticut), "Representations of partially ordered sets".
Dr Phillip Sharp (Auckland), "High performance computing: the PowerChallenge at the University of Auckland ... some of the issues".
Dr Peter Renaud, "Irrational thoughts - Apery's proof of the irrationality of Zeta(3)"
Professor Elemer E Rosinger (University of Pretoria), "Algebraic and order completion methods for solving nonlinear PDE's and a solution to Hilbert's fifth problem".
Peter Renaud
LANDCARE
Aroon visited CSIRO, Division of Atmospheric Research, Melbourne to discuss the coupling of soil organic matter and plant production models to permit climate impacts and CO2 responses, to be investigated. He also got to discuss the progress of the Australian CLIMPACTS project, a climate impacts project that is modelled around the New Zealand version, involving CEARS at Waikato University and 5 CRI's.
Rhys Gibson, a former honours student of Graeme Wake, has left Landcare Research to join the Wellington computer firm, Paradigm Technologies. He has had a very productive 2 years at Landcare and has been working on erosion models using Monte Carlo methods.
Aroon Parshotam
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MASSEY UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS
Staff update:
Welcome to Dr Francis Thio who took up a Senior Lectureship at the Albany campus in June. Meanwhile, Bruce van Brunt, appointed as a Lecturer to the Department in 1991, has been promoted to Senior Lecturer. Vicki Fallaver has resigned her secretarial position during July after 19 months with us; we wish her well as she takes up her new position as MBA Secretary in the Institute of Executive Development here at Massey University.
Robert McLachlan has been elected to the NZMS Council. Robert McKibbin has recently been elected to the Editorial Board of the new "Journal of Porous Media".
Research:
A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) facility has been added to the tools available for numerical analysis in the Department. A new DEC AlphaStation with the PHOENICS package is now available for a variety of heat and mass transfer problems currently being investigated within the Department and in other faculties in the University, as well as providing a valuable capacity for approaching new modelling projects which involve fluid and energy flows.
Visitors:
Charles Little has had two visitors working with him on graph theory: Mike Plummer from Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee) and Michael Henning from the University of Natal. Others on briefer visits contributed to our seminar series, as listed below.
Staff travel/conferences:
Robert McLachlan is on leave for the second semester as a Visiting Fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England. The Institute, founded in 1993, hosts a series of six-month workshops, and the upcoming one is on the "Mathematics of Atmospheres". Robert will use the opportunity to get back into computational fluid dynamics (the subject of his PhD) and explore applications of Hamiltonian methods to atmospheric motion - although it is unlikely that better weather forecasts will immediately result. He is also relieved to be escaping another Palmy winter and spring and will not return until it warms up a bit, i.e., in December.
Robert McKibbin presented a paper the International Conference on Porous Media and their Applications in Science, Engineering and Industry held during June in Hawai'i, and, much closer to home, was an Invited Speaker at the Mathematics Colloquium.
Mahyar Amouzegar, during a fortnight's travel between semesters, went to San Francisco State University and gave a talk in their Applied Mathematics Seminar on "Global Optimization Methods for Bilevel Programming". He attended the XIX annual conference on Systems Engineering at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago where he presented a paper on "A Cutting Plane Algorithm for Linear Reverse Convex Programs", and also gave a talk at Universidad de Andes (UniAndes), Bogota, in Colombia. Meanwhile Mahyar has been invited to present a paper in the next INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Science) conference in Atlanta, GA, during November.
Also recently taking overseas leave are: Wolfgang Vogel (reported in the last Newsletter); Mike Carter in the UK, Spain (at the 8th ICME Conference, in Seville), Portugal (at the International Conference on the Relation between the History and Pedagogy of Mathematics, in Braga), and in South Africa (visiting the University of Witwatersrand and the University of South Africa); Glenda Anthony in Australia (at the MERGA conference - see below - and the Mathematics Education Lecturers' Association conference), the UK and Spain (at the ICME conference in Seville); Gordon Knight in the UK and Spain (at the ICME conference in Seville).
Mathematics Education Award:
Congratulations to Glenda Anthony who received the Practical Implications Award at the recent Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia (MERGA) Conference in Melbourne. The award, consisting of a plaque plus $500, was designed to stimulate the writing of papers on original research related to mathematics teaching or learning. Specifically, the paper was required to identify a persistent and recurring problem in the practice of mathematics education, describe a research activity related to this problem and develop strategies to resolve it. In Glenda's paper "Classroom Instructional Factors Affecting Mathematics Students' Strategic Learning Behaviours" a range of factors including classroom orientation, task demands, worked examples, student opportunities to direct learning and assessment were discussed in relation to the development and use of learning strategies. Instruction, focused on the need for understanding and learning from errors, must model a wide range of learning strategies and provide students with feedback on their use of strategies and engender appropriate beliefs about mathematics and learning if students are to employ strategies directed at meaningful knowledge construction rather than at task completion. The paper is based on findings from Dr Anthony's doctoral research study which examined strategic learning processes in the senior mathematics classroom.
Scholars:
The 1996 Industrial Research Ltd Bursary in Applied Mathematics has been awarded to Mathematics Honours student David Sherriff. David was recently presented with his cheque and certificate by Dr Graham Weir, leader of the IRL Applied Mathematics Group, at a small ceremony here at Massey.
Congratulations also to our graduate students Tammy Smith and Anton Raviraj Selvaratnam who were joint winners of the Aitken Prize for the best student talks presented at the 1996 Mathematics Colloquium held at Massey University.
Recent PhD successes: Kelvin Watson (chief supervisor John Giffin), Peter Waddell and Elizabeth Watson (both in mathematical phylogeny, and co-supervised by Mike Hendy - the interdisciplinary link is noteworthy).
PhD student Mary Day has been a busy conference attendee and speaker recently. As well as giving a paper at the Mathematics Colloquium, Mary attended a conference on "Science - Women and Our Future" in Wellington during May and spoke on "The experiences of eight women mathematicians". She also attended the GASAT (Gender Science and Technology Association) Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific 2nd Regional Conference which was held in Auckland during July and presented her paper "Disrupting the gender, mathematics and education literature: Different approaches to old questions". Publication of these papers is imminent.
Teaching:
A restructured 300-level programme will be offered in 1997 which introduces a new mathematical modelling paper and reassembles other material. Discussion is currently under way about our Honours-level programmes. Various new "joint" majors are available from next year in the new Bachelor of Information Sciences (BInfSc) degree to be offered by the Faculty, including programmes which link Mathematics with Computer Science, Physics, Statistics, Education and Finance as well as a major in Applied and Computational Mathematics which incorporates a theme of mathematical modelling techniques from traditional Applied Mathematics and Operations Research.
1996 Mathematics Colloquium:
Congratulations to the local group, headed by Mike Hendy, who so successfully organised the recent NZ Mathematics Colloquium at Massey. Most Massey Mathematics Department staff and postgraduate students attended, and contributed either by helping to organise the conference or by presenting papers. A brief report on the Colloquium can be found elsewhere in this issue.
Mathematics in the local community:
Albany staff Dr Shaun Cooper (Mathematics) and Dr Denny Meyer (Statistics) have been running a mathematical problem-solving competition for senior secondary school students on the North Shore; it has generated an unexpectedly large amount of interest.
Where are they now? - News of past students
Recent students who have completed their PhD's in mathematical phylogeny, supervised by Mike Hendy and Dave Penny, are now all on the move. This year's graduates include Liz Watson and Peter Waddell. Liz, a BSc in Zoology from Massey, did field work in Africa and DNA analysis in Germany developing some new network analysis to interpret her data on the Mitochondrial sequences of sub-Saharan Human populations. Liz has recently moved to Sweden with her partner Tom and her new son Leo. She is continuing with her interpretation of her sequence data which should lead to a greater understanding of the early human divergences.
Peter Waddell studied statistical significance of evolutionary tree analysis. During his studies he collaborated with software developers at the Smithsonian in Washington, and has contributed theory which is incorporated in the just-published software package PAUP* which extends the sophisticated and popular PAUP used by many phylogenists. Peter is now considering offers of Postdocs from the United States and Germany.
Mike Charleston, who was a PhD student and Graduate Assistant in the Department while investigating algorithmic aspects of phylogenetic reconstruction, left for a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Austin, Texas, in 1994, and then accepted a further Fellowship with zoologist Rod Page (formerly of the University of Auckland) in the Institute of Biomedical and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow. After 8 months in Glasgow, Mike reports being surrounded by biologists who appreciate having a mathematician around, even if they don't all understand what he is up to. Computational facilities are excellent, but Mike is also seriously investigating the huge number of Glaswegian pubs!
Seminars
Professor Jürgen Stuckrad (University of Leipzig, Germany), "Gröbner bases and applications".
Dr Sören Perrey, "Mathematical models for games".
Dr Robert B. Russell (University of Auckland), "Adaptive numerical methods for solving PDEs and their applications".
Dr Kay Nieselt-Struwe (University of Auckland), "The origin of genetic codes".
Dr Michael D. Plummer (Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, USA), "Extending matchings in graphs: An update".
Dr Michael Henning (University of Natal, South Africa), "Homogeneous embeddings of vertex-transitive graphs in graphs".
Professor Elemer E. Rosinger (University of Pretoria, South Africa), "Algebraic and Order Completion methods for solving nonlinear PDEs, and a solution to Hilbert's Fifth problem".
Dr Charles Little, "A short proof of Read's formula for the number of labelled even graphs with n vertices and m edges".
Dr Igor Boglaev, "Domain decomposition algorithms for problems with boundary and interior layers and their parallel implementations".
Mathematical Physics Seminar
Professor Robert McKibbin, "Cycles, psychrometry and super-heated steam - thermodynamics in theory and in practice".
Dr Igor Boglaev, "Boundary and interior layer (singular perturbation) problems in physical and technological processes - analytical and numerical techniques".
Dr Joseph D. Seymour (Physics), "Some random thoughts on fluctuations and transport coefficients: An introduction to stochastic dynamics".
Professor Paul Callaghan (Physics), "Rouse modes, reptation and reorientation".
Mathematical Modelling Discussion Group
Professor Robert McKibbin, "Mathematical modelling: Interdisciplinary conversations".
Nigel Yee (Production Technology), "Modelling the behaviour of a pneumatic muscle for use in low-cost, lightweight robotics".
David Tanner (Production Technology), "Establishing sub-model hierarchies in building generalised system simulations".
Sylvia Estrada-Flores (Process and Environmental Technology), "Dynamic modelling of pressure vessels for refrigeration plants using a thermodynamic approach".
Dr Clive Marsh (Production Technology), "Modelling the uncertainty".
Dr Lilian Ferreira (Process and Environmental Technology), "Tray-by-tray simulation of distillation columns".
Dr Ken Louie (AgResearch, Palmerston North), "Is bigger better? - a Tale of Two Models".
Nigel Russell (Production Technology), "Neural network modelling of a falling-film evaporator".
Paul Milliken (Production Technology), "Issues in guaranteed cost control".
Julian Witt (Process and Environmental Technology), "Use of mathematical modelling to assess and improve coolchain performance".
Dr Igor Boglaev, "Mathematical modelling of the technological process based on internal oxidation".
Dr Mustapha Özilgen (Production Technology), "Recent advances in mathematical modelling of drying processes".
Robert McKibbin
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UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS
Our greatest sympathy to Professor Vernon Squire who has taken over as Head of Department for at least the next five years. May he be a compassionate autocrat.
Professor Derek Holton was notified on 17 April that he had received a Paul Erdös Award for his significant contribution to the enrichment of mathematics learning within New Zealand. So far he is the only recipient ever from New Zealand. He was presented with the Award at the International Congress on Mathematical Education in Seville, Spain in July. The Paul Erdös National Award was established by World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions to recognise contributions of mathematicians that have played a significant role in the development of mathematical challenges at the national level, and which have been a stimulus for the enrichment of mathematics learning. The awards are made biennially. In 1996 there were 3 recipients.
Speaking of competitions, during the mid-semester break 11,700 scripts for the National Bank Junior Mathematics Competition (NBJMC) were marked by 25-30 senior maths students and committee members: John Curran, Graham Haase, David Hill, Derek Holton, Dennis McCaughan and Caryn Thompson. The Competition caters to students in forms 3, 4 and 5, and for the past few years over 10 000 students from over 250 high schools have entered. One of the principal aims of the NBJMC is to encourage students to write good mathematics and to explain clearly their answers.
In November last year a team from the BBC came to film part of a series for the Open University called "Seeing Through Mathematics", which is being screened in the UK this year. The series considers various applications of mathematics, including two being carried out by members of our Department: Dion Burns and David Fletcher. Colin Fox of University of Auckland, also features in the series.
From 12-17 April, the Department ran its eighth Mathematics Camp in Wanaka for Secondary School students. These camps are held to enable good maths students to extend the areas of maths they know about and to try out their problem-solving skills in the company of other able maths students. The maths programme was run by Professor Derek Holton and Dr Stefano Luzzatto (who was visiting the Department from Warwick University). The outdoor programme, which included rockclimbing and a 3-hour tramp above Diamond Lake among other things, was run by Coralie Daniel (a Mathematics PhD student) and Colin MacKenzie (a Phys Ed student).
Following the successful first international conference on Statistics in Ecology and Environmental Monitoring (SEEM 1), held at the University of Otago in December 1993, SEEM 2 was held at Otago from 24-28 June with the general theme Decision Making and Risk Assessment in Biology. The Centre for Applications of Statistics and Mathematics (CASM, the consulting arm of the Otago Mathematics and Statistics Department), was the organiser for this international conference. As with the first conference, SEEM 2 brought together biomathematicians, ecologists, environmental scientists, resource managers and statisticians with a common interest in the application of statistical methods to ecological and environmental problems. In particular, SEEM 2 provided a summary of the latest advances in the use of statistical methods in risk assessment at a level suitable for both scientists and managers.
New PhDs
Alastair Duffy. Supervisor: Professor Derek Holton; Provisional Title: Hamiltonian Graph Theory.
John Enlow. Supervisors: Dr Roland Broadbent (Department of Paediatrics and Child Health), Dr Patricia Cragg (Physiology), Professor Vernon Squire and Dr Ray Enlow (Department of Maths and Stats); Provisional Title: Modelling of Surfactant Administrations in Premature Babies and Asthma Patients.
Roger Glendenning. Supervisors: Dr Ray Enlow (Mathematics and Statistics) and Dr Patricia Langhorne (Physics); Provisional Title: Biphasic Metal (NiTi) REM Simulation with Orthodontic Applications.
Mr Charlie Laman. Supervisor: Professor Bryan Manly; Provisional Title: Randomization Tests of Abundance-based assembly rules in community ecology.
Mr Chris Linsell. Supervisors: Professor Derek Holton and Dr Bruce McMillan (Education Dept); Provisional Title: Activity based mathematics programmes.
Dr Robert Aldred and Dr Laimonis Kavalieris were each promoted to Senior Lecturer and Dr Peter Fenton was promoted across the bar on the Senior Lecturer scale.
Dr Russell Millar left the Department in mid-April to take a senior lectureship with the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland, Tamaki campus.
Some Research Highlights
David Fletcher and Raymond Webster had a paper appear in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics. The paper arose out of a problem encountered in the analysis of a recent cockle biomass survey at Papanui Inlet and Blueskin Bay, and was entitled "Skewness-Corrected Confidence Intervals for Stratified Biological Surveys".
Bryan Manly and David Fletcher were awarded a $60,000 contract by the Department of Conservation to analyse data on the accidental catch of marine mammals and sea birds by commercial fishing in New Zealand. The aim of the work is to assess the extent of the problem and advise on the design of future surveys to monitor the situation. Alyson Seyb, who has started an MSc in Statistics, will be employed as the research assistant.
Dr Laimonis Kavalieris spent two and a half weeks in April at the Queensland University of Technology working on part of a long term research project that aims to develop statistical methods to deal with time series data exhibiting long range dependence. Applications to modelling urban air pollution are driving this project, which continues to attract funding from the Australian Research Council.
Professor Vernon Squire, our HOD, has received the first copy of his book 'Moving Loads on Ice Plates', written with Roger Hosking (James Cook University, Australia), Arnold Kerr (University of Delaware, US) and Pat Langhorne (Physics), and published by Kluwer Academic in the Netherlands. The book is in the series 'Solid Mechanics and its Applications'. The research monograph was completed while Vernon was on Study Leave at Cambridge University, England, and Clarkson University in the USA. Some other work done jointly with Mike Meylan and Murray Barrett has also now appeared in Journal of Geophysical Research or is in the press. Vernon has recently been invited to give a plenary keynote address on marginal ice zone biology (he was surprised too) at a forthcoming Gordon Conference, and is scheduled as an invited speaker at ANZIAM '98.
Professor Bryan Manly travelled to Britain to represent New Zealand at a meeting arranged at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). The meeting was concerned with technical aspects of the presentation and analysis of data that are used by CCAMLR to monitor animal populations that are part of the Antarctic ecosystem.
Seminars
Professor Vernon Squire, "Cool Maths".
Hugh Best (Wellington) "Demography of NZ fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri) on West Coast, South Island, New Zealand".
Professor Bryan Manly, "Salmon Survival in the Snake River: Are Mark-Recapture Methods Scientifically Sound?"
Professor John Rayner (Wollongong), "Three vignettes: estimating Saddam's arsenal, Pascal's rectangle, and dots and lines".
Gary Dunnet (Statistics NZ), "How Statistics Match Superstition and Public Policy".
Dr Philip Dixon (University of Georgia), "Are Amphibian Populations Declining? The Difference Between Testing for Trend and No Trend".
David Tan (Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Cambridge), "Spacecraft destabilization and atmospheric modelling".
Professor Jim Hartman (College of Wooster College, Ohio), "Undergraduate Mathematics in the United States - A Limited Viewpoint".
Professor Gary Krause (University of Missouri) "The use of Accelerated Life Tests to Estimate Long-Time Exposure (Chronic) Effects of Risk, Using Fishes".
Dr Hamish Spencer (Zoology), "The Mathematical Population Genetics of Genomic imprinting".
Professor John Rayner (Wollongong), "Extensions to the Sign Test".
Dr Ian Wanless (ANU), "Some Unusual Graph Games".
Dr Dennis McCaughan, "Pell and Pi: Two slices on number theory".
Dr John Harris, "A `proof' of the truth table for 'A != B'.
Dr David Fletcher, "All Creatures Great and Small: Tales from Statistical Ecology".
Dr Ross Sanders (School of Phys Ed), "Using Fourier Analysis in Human Movement Analysis".
Dr David Fletcher, "When to plant this year's crop? How simple statistical methods can be used to assess risk in agriculture".
Vernon A. Squire
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VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS
We are all delighted that Geoff Whittle received the NZMS Award for Mathematical Research at the Colloquium at Massey. That is, Geoff is delighted and the rest of us are basking in the reflected glory.
Rod Downey is being kept on his toes with two postdoctoral fellows recently arrived, Jeff Laforte from Michigan and Florida, and Richard Coles from Leeds. Both are funded by the Marsden Fund. André Nies of the University of Chicago has also been visiting Rod, and attended the New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium 1996.
Matt Visser completed an MSc in Mathematics at VUW in 1980 with a thesis on "Cosmic time, tachyons and the aether", and is now at Washington University in St. Louis. Last year his book "Lorentzian wormholes : from Einstein to Hawking" was published by the American Institute of Physics. His views on wormholes are discussed in the cover article of New Scientist for 26 March 1996.
John Harper was the ANZIAM invited lecturer at the 1996 New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium, where he spoke about some rather interesting applications of fluid dynamics, including a study of the way that bubbles rise in a beer glass.
Konnichi-wa to Vladimir Pestov, who visited Science University of Tokyo for two weeks in April to undertake joint research in noncommutative geometry and supergroup theory with Hideki Omori.
The Japanese connection is furthered also by Irene Pestov, who is completing a PhD in geothermal two-phase flows, and has been awarded a Japanese Science and Technology Postdoctoral Fellowship. It will be sayonara to Irene in November, when she goes to Tohoku National Industrial Research Institute (Sendai, Japan) for three months, to work on two-phase flows in pipes.
Here is a list of recent seminars in the department:
Mark McGuinness, "Geothermal Heat Pipes".
Vladimir Pestov (VUW), "Supergeometry, Point Functor, and a Certain No-Problem".
Irene Pestov, "Propagation of small disturbances through a porous medium saturated by a two-phase fluid".
Robert D. Russell (Simon Fraser, BC), "Adaptive Numerical Methods for Solving PDEs and their Applications".
Hahn Ko, "Some Tales of Large Cardinals".
Freda Goodall, Mark McGuinness, and Mimi Recker, "Geometric Constructions and Computer Graphics".
Geoff Whittle, "Combinatorics and Geometry".
André Nies (The University of Chicago), "Logical Questions About Free Groups".
Stephen Archer, "Borel Games, strategies for winning".
Vladimir Pestov, "A curious little example of nonstandard analysis at work".
David Tan (Cambridge University), "Fluids research: spacecraft destabilization and atmospheric modelling".
Karl Svozil (Vienna, visiting Auckland), "Quantum Computing".
Mark McGuinness
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WAIKATO UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS?
Ingrid Melchert had a baby girl, Laura Anne, weighing 7lb 8oz on 10 June. Ingrid will return to academic duties towards the end of July.
Ian Hawthorn was involved with mentoring Sarah Healy, a seventh former who took part in the World Mathematics Olympiad held in India in early July.
Alfred Sneyd has been on study leave since early June and is spending most of his time in Grenoble. The rest of his study leave will be spent in Kyoto and Brisbane.
The month of July was a month when a number of members of the Department caught the travel bug (some caught the flu bug as well, but that's another story).
Kevin Broughan attended the Mathematics Colloquium. He and Martin Glanvill, his DPhil. student, gave a talk on mesh generation for the finite element method. Kevin then headed off to Athens for the Second World Congress of Nonlinear Analysts.
In a similar vein, Ernie Kalnins attended the Colloquium before heading to Brisbane. After being back only a week from Australia, Ernie was away again; this time to give eight invited lectures on partial differential equations and special functions in Bogota, Colombia.
Douglas Bridges attended the Colloquium before going on study leave. His leave will involve some time in Japan and Vienna. Douglas was also overseas in April when he was in the Netherlands. While there, one of his duties was to be a PhD examiner. With all this movement of staff, Ian Craig was landed the task of being Acting Chairperson for a few weeks in July.
For the first time since your local correspondent has been here, the University's Information Day was held on a normal teaching day. This gave high school students the opportunity to see mathematicians in action. However, there were difficulties with finding rooms for our displays.
Seminars
A. Nies (University of Chicago), "Structures arising from computability theory"
M. Schroder, "Calculus without limits? Calculus without derivatives? Whatever next?"
I. Hawthorn, "How to prove some famous theorems with one hand tied behind your back".
E. Kalnins, "Superintegrability in two dimensional Euclidean space and associated polynomial solutions".
R. McIntosh (University of Regina), "Asymptotics and new mock theta functions".
D. Tan (Centre for Atmospheric Research, Cambridge University), "Fluids research: spacecraft destabilization and atmospheric modelling".
Stephen Joe