There have been visits from universities. Graeme Wake (Auckland) has recently held workshops with several biologists at Ruakura: Tom MacFadden (lactation physiology), John Bass (action of myostatin gene), Gil Le Roux (microbiology) to introduce dynamical systems modelling to those areas. Judi McWhirter (Waikato) visited Roger Littlejohn (Invermay) during February and March, to work on methods and software for analysing hormone profiles.
We have visited each other. Tony Pleasants and Tanya Soboleva (Ruakura) attended a recent workshop on gene mapping at Wallaceville. Simon Woodward and Dave McCall visited Grasslands to demonstrate progress withtheir pasture growth model.
Mick Roberts and Rowland Kao attended ANZIAM'98 at Coolangatta, and both presented papers based on dynamical systems models for tuberculosis in possums.
Congratulations to Tracey Flux who has been awarded an MSc with distinction for her thesis on "Dynamical Systems Models of Ryegrass and Clover Growth". This work was a joint project between the Mathematics Department at Massey University (supervisor Robert McKibbin) and Harry Clark, Paul Newton and Ken Louie at AgResearch (Grasslands).
Mick Roberts
__________
IRL, Applied Maths
We have had a number of new faces at Applied Maths over the past few months. Towards the end of 1997 we were visited by a German student, Micol Martini as part of the requirements of her degree. She worked with Graham Weir on transient heat flows under the Taupo Volcanic Zone.
Over the university vacation, Katy Espie worked with Karen Garner developing models to optimise the benefits of wind generated electricity. In February, Shaun Hendy returned to New Zealand from Alberta, Canada, where he completed a PhD entitled "Cosmic Strings and Black Hole Space Times". He has a 4 month appointment with IRl, where he will be working with Applied Maths and the Superconducting group.
In December, Karen Garner attended the Asian Pacific Operations Research Societies Conference in Melbourne, where she gave a paper entitled "Optimising the value of wind generated electricity in New Zealand". Kit Withers attended a NIWA conference to strengthen his contacts in the climate area.
John Burnell
__________
UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND
School of Mathematical and Information Sciences
On Thursday February 19, Professor Hans Schupp (Universität des Saarlandes) had started to deliver a seminar in the Department of Mathematics, when the Auckland power system failed. Twentyfive hours later the last major cable supplying power to the central city exploded - and Auckland closed down for 16 days. The University of Auckland opened 1 week late on Monday March 9, when Auckland began limping after 16 days of total paralysis. Lights are restricted throughout the central city, lifts and air-conditioners are unusable, e-mail has crashed repeatedly and it has been very difficult to operate any laboratories. Some lectures still have to be cut short, for lack of ventilation. On Friday March 27, Mercury Energy announced that full power had been restored to the city - and the power supply promptly crashed for 90 minutes. As of April 2, many buildings in the city are keeping their hired diesel generators chugging away.
The 1997 SMIS Director's Awards for teaching were awarded to Richard Lobb (Computer Science), Geoff Nicholls (Mathematics) and Ilze Ziedins (Statistics).
Department of Computer Science
Peter Fenwick has been promoted over the bar in the Senior Lecturer's scale, Hans Guesgen has been promoted within the Senior Lecturer's scale, Bakh Khoussainov has been promoted to Senior Lecturer, S. Manoharan has been promoted within the Lecturer's scale, and Robert Sheehan has been promoted within the Senior Tutor's scale.
Seminars
Dr Ryszard Kozera (University of Western Australia), "Review of shape from shading - open problems for shape reconstruction algorithms".
Professor Robert O'Callahan (Carnegie-Mellon University), "Bright lights, big city", and "Scalable program analysis and understanding based on type inference".
Dr Qiwen Xu (United Nations University, Macau), "Towards a formal semantics of Verilog using duration calculus".
Dr Cyrus Nourani (METAAI and The University of California), "Intelligent multimedia - new technique and paradigms".
Professor Hermann Maurer, "How modern WWW systems can support teaching and training".
Dr Brian Henderson-Sellers (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne), "OPEN's support for UML?".
Department of Mathematics
Dr Mohan Chinnappan, from Curtin University and Queensland Institute of Technology, has been appointed as Lecturer in the Mathematics Education Unit.
Congratulations to Professor David Gauld, who has been awarded a New Zealand Science and Technology Medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand. These medals were instituted by the New Zealand Government in 1990 to recognise significant contributions to the advancement of science and technology, and they bear a likeness of Ernest Lord Rutherford on one side and the emblem of the Royal Society of New Zealand on the other. The 1997 medals were presented by the Governor-General at a ceremony in Wellington on March 19th. The NZ S&T Gold Medal for 1997 was awarded to Emeritus Professor Thomas William Walker, a soil scientist from Lincoln University.
Norm Levenberg has been promoted over the bar in the Senior Lecturer's scale; and Jianbei An, Colin Fox and Margaret Morton have each been promoted to Senior Lecturer.
Garry Tee retired at the end of January, and he is continuing to teach courses on the History of Computing and on the History of Mathematics.
Vivien Kirk's baby Joshua arrived on January 16 in the early evening, and he weighed 3.11 kg at birth. Both Vivien and Joshua are very well (Marc too!).
Andrew Stafford, head of the Mathematics Department at Manurewa High School, has a Royal Society New Zealand Science and Technology Teacher Fellowship, and he will be spending 1998 in the Department. He is joined by Julia Horring (Kelston Girls High School) and Christine Kiernan (Lynfield College), who both have 1-year Study Awards from the Ministry of Education.
Warren Moors has accepted a 2.5 year Fellowship at Victoria University under Vladimir Pestov, starting on 1998 February 1.
Emily Lane and Louise Parsons, who have both recently completed MSc theses in Applied Mathematics, are temporary Tutors for the first part of the year, and Louise is also employed as a temporary programmer to assist staff and senior students at the Tamaki campus. Wendy Stratton is taking a joint part-time appointment as a Tutor in Engineering Science and in Mathematics.
Five new Honorary Research Fellows are attached to the Department this year: Dr Kim Myung Ho (topology), Dr Ali Jabballah (interests in algebra), Dr Majid Ali (algebra), Dr Kuo-Jye Chen (partitions and q-series), and Dr Manoj Kantroo (fuzzy sets).
Professor Vadim Adamjan, visiting from the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Odessa, gave a course of 9 lectures on Financial Mathematics. Professor Satya Deo, from Jabalpur, is visiting until the end of June, for joint work with David Gauld.
David Smith has undergone surgery on his back, and he expects to be back in the Department after 4 weeks.
Norm Levenberg has returned from leave at Indiana University and the University of Toronto, and Eamonn O'Brien has returned from short leave. Boris Pavlov is on leave, Jianbei An is on leave, and Michael Thomas is on leave until June, at Open University and Warwick University, John Pearson has completed his PhD, on computational results in topological graph theory.
Alona Ben-Tal and Ed Clark have been awarded University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarships from 1998. Tamsin Roberts is a new PhD student, who came from Australia to work with Bill Barton on the topic of mathematics education for indigenous cultures. Two former PhD students, Sina Greenwood and Peter Johnston, are re-activating their PhD registrations this year, under the supervision of David Gauld and John Butcher respectively, and both plan to complete in the near future. John MacCormick completed a Masters degree with Distinction in Mathematics at the University of Auckland, before going to Oxford to study for a doctorate in computer imaging towards the end of 1996. He has been awarded a Jowett Senior Scholarship at Balliol College in Oxford, carrying a stipend, dining rights and guaranteed accommodation.
A 1-day "String Seminar" was held at the university marae on March 11. Six members of the Department spent the day with 6 experts in whai (string games), sharing ideas and experiences. This joining of experts from mathematics and from Maori culture was filmed by the Audiovisual Unit, to produce a videotape for schools.
On Tuesday March 31, John Butcher was ambushed by a group of graduate students, who heartily sang "Happy birthday to you" for John's 65th birthday.
A Mini-Symposium on "Ordinary and Stochastic Differential Equations: Numerical Methods and Applications", organized by John Butcher, Robert Chan, Nicolette Goodwin and Allison Heard, was held on January 21 and 22. The principal speakers were Professor Kevin Burrage and Pamela Burrage (University of Queensland), and the other speakers included Robert Chan, Wiremu Solomon, Igor Boglaev (Massey University), Margot Gerritsen (Department of Engineering Science), Graeme Wake and Nicolas Roubidoux (Massey University).
Seminars
Dr Mark Nelson (Royal Society of London Research Fellow), "A Mathematical insight into the design of fire-resistant materials".
Abdul Mohamad, "Autohomeomorphism groups of manifolds".
Dr Margaret Morton and Dr David McIntyre, "Undergraduate mathematics: report of a conference".
Professor David Gauld, "When is a manifold metrisable if chunks of it are?", and "Matveev's property (a) and related properties".
Professor John Dempsey (Clarkson University), "Scale effects in sea-ice fracture".
Dr James Lawry (Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), "Exponential asymptotics".
Professor Vaughan Jones, "On the Poincare series of a planar algebra".
Professor Alan Camina (University of East Anglia), "Sizes of conjugacy classes in finite groups", and "Some infinite designs".
S. Adi Purnomo and Angela Tsai (4th year Technology Students), "Epidemiology of measles".
Professor Hans Schupp (Universität des Saarlandes), "Mathematics didactics in Germany".
Professor Tao Qui, (University of New England, Armidale), "Fourier analysis on starlike Lipschitz surface in the quaternion and Euclidean Space", and "Mathematical aesthetic principles/nonintegrable systems".
Professor John Butcher, "Almost Runge-Kutta methods".
Professor Michael J. D. Powell (University of Cambridge), "Radial basis function methods for global optimisation".
Professor John Hearne (University of Natal), "Optimal management of multispecies herbivores".
Dr Murray Muraskin (Queensland), "Mathematical aesthetic principles/nonintegrable systems".
Professor Al Taylor (University of Michigan), "Which linear partial differential equations can be solved by a formula?", and "Teaching undergraduate mathematics: a view from the chair".
Cameron Walker, "The infinitude of 7-arc-transitive graphs".
Dr Paul Gartside (University College of Galway), "Near-metric properties of hyperspaces", and "Ubiquity of free subgroups".
Dr Sergei Federov, "On one recent result on the intersection of weighted Hardy spaces".
Professor Boris Pavlov, "Quantum and acoustic waveguides, resonators and networks".
Dr Sing K. Nguang (Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering), "Robust control of a class of continuous fermentation processes".
Dr Paul Bonnington, "Non-isomorphic triangulations of complete graphs".
Associate Professor Gordon Mallinson and Dr Andrew Reztsov, (Department of Mechanical Engineering), "Structural surfaces in three-dimensional vector fields".
Dr Norm Levenberg, "Hulls and envelopes".
Professor Satya Deo (University of Jabalpur), "Discrete groups and discontinuous actions".
Dr Shayne Waldron, "Multivariate polynomial interpolation".
Department of Statistics
Vera Eastwood has been promoted to Senior Lecturer, and Renate Meyer has been promoted within the Lecturer's scale. Joss Cumming has been appointed as Senior Tutor.
For this year, Robert Gentleman is spending half of his time as Senior Research Fellow at the Clinical Trials Unit of the School of Medicine.
Thomas Yee has returned from leave at Stanford University. Professor Carl Schwartz (Simon Fraser University) is visiting for this year, to work with George Seber, Alan Lee and Chris Triggs on their Marsden Research Project Mohammed Salehi has completed his PhD; with a thesis on biassed sampling.
George Seber's 60th birthday was celebrated by a Seminar and Dinner on April 7. At the seminar, Chris Triggs spoke on "The Linear Hypothesis - a review after more than 30 years", and Professor Carl Schwartz (Simon Fraser University) spoke on "The estimation of animal abundance and related parameters". After the Dinner, George departed to Australia for the rest of his leave.
Seminars
Dr Shane Henderson (Department of Engineering Science), "A numerically stable one-pass algorithm for computing variance estimators in simulation".
Dr Sharon Guy Browning (University of Washington), "Monte-Carlo estimation of relationship likelihood from genomic identity by descent data".
Professor David R. Brillinger (University of California - Berkeley), "Estimating the characteristics of space debris".
Professor Edward A. Silver (University of Calgary), "Suggested heuristic approaches for dealing with probabilistic combinatorial decision problems".
Dr Geoffrey Pritchard, "Empirical second-largest eigenvalues for Markov chains".
Dr Grace Chen (UNSW), "An effective method for simulating Gaussian and related random fields".
Garry J. Tee
_________________________________________
UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Dr Alan Wilms has joined us recently at canterbury, strengthening the department's biomathematics research group. Dr Frank Lad has recently retired from the department, and will be greatly missed by all. The department is enjoying visits from Professors John Dennis (Rice University), Kees Onneweer (University of New Mexico), and Zelda Zabinsky (University of Washington), who have respectively given seminars on industrial optimization, harmonic analysis, and global optimization.
Chris Price
_________________________________________
MASSEY UNIVERSITY
Institute of Fundamental Sciences (Mathematics)
Dr Kathi Huber, a recent graduate from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and more recently from mid Sweden University at Sundsvall, has arrived to take a post doctoral fellowship with Dave Penny and Mike Hendy in their Marsden-funded phylogenetic analysis research project. Kathi studied under Andreas Dress (New Zealand Maths Society visiting lecturer in 1993) in the field of T-theory, a mathematical theory developed to better express the complex relationships inferred by comparative biological data.
One of the specific projects they are engaged in is the development of graphs which highlight evolutionary relationships, where the signal is too complex for traditional evolutionary tree methods to analyse. Their recent work with former PhD student Liz Watson, on the human mitochondrial sequence data she gathered in Africa, has already proved invaluable in shedding light on early human migration. Kathi has worked on the Buneman graph construction problem with Mike Hendy and with Andreas, who both have close links with the developers of the network and splitsgraph algorithms.
Glenda Anthony, Mike Carter, and Gillian Thornley attended the Symposium on Modern Undergraduate Mathematics, held in Brisbane from 24 to 27 November 1997. Mike talked about the design of the paper he teaches for Applied Science students, and Gillian talked about her experiences with the introduction of computer-based assignments in a calculus paper. This was a very valuable conference addressing some of the issues which are currently exercising all our minds, concerning what and how we should be teaching in these days of declining student numbers and increasingly powerful technology.
In July, Igor Boglaev was appointed to the permanent staff as a Senior Lecturer. Igor had been at Massey University for the previous two years on a temporary appointment.
Adrian Swift took early retirement in February 1998 and has moved north to live in Auckland, where he has part-time duties at the Albany campus. He and his wife Gillian are becoming acclimatized to the City of Sails, and all it can offer them.
Mike Hendy has been appointed member of the Marsden Fund Panels in 1998. Gillian Thornley, Charles Little and Dean Halford were made Fellows of the New Zealand Mathematical Society. Marijcke Vlieg has been appointed as an Honorary Associate in Mathematics. Robert McKibbin has been elected a member of the Executive Committee of ANZIAM (Australia and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics).
Four Massey University Doctoral Scholarships were awarded to mathematics postgraduate students.
Five students in the initial intake of MEdStuds (Mathematics) have completed their masterate program: Phillipa Arnold, Learning through language: Implications in a mathematics class; Alison Fagan, The Effects of Using Manipulatives on the Transfer of Three Dimensional Spatial Visualisation to Two Dimensions; Derek Glover, Mathematics Achievement in the Transition from Intermediate School to High School; Jan Savell, Using Parent Newsletters to Enhance Junior Primary School Mathematics; and Derek Smith, Graphical Calculators in the Classroom. It is a credit to all of these students that they have continued to advance in their careers throughout their program of study: Alison, Derek, Phillipa and Derek all hold senior positions in secondary mathematics departments and Jan has recently joined the College of Education at Massey University. The programs were all completed extramurally, with several receiving a half year study leave to assist with thesis completion. This year it is expected that another five students will complete their MEdStuds (Mathematics) thesis research.
Grant Allen has graduated with an MSc in Mathematics. In his thesis "On the acoustical theory of the trumpet: Is it sound?", on acoustical modelling, discussing in particular the fluid dynamics near a trumpeter's lips and how this flow interacts with the rest of the trumpet system. He is now working for PEC in Marton.
Tracey Flux has graduated with an MSc with Distinction, in Mathematics. Her thesis, "Dynamical systems models for growth of ryegrass and clover," is a study and analysis of a compartmental model for grass growth. She is currently doing programming work for AgResearch in Palmerston North. Grant and Tracey both studied under Dr Robert McKibbin.
Mary Day recently defended her PhD thesis "From the Experiences of Women Mathematicians: a Feminist Epistemology for Mathematics", having studied under Dr Gillian Thornley. She is teaching maths at Freyberg High School at present.
Seminars
John Hudson, "Three-Manifolds".
Robert McLachlan, "A Unified Presentation of Systems with Integrals and/or Lyapunov Functions".
Robert McLachlan
Institute of Information Sciences and Technology (Statistics)
Massey still has statisticians although the Statistics Department exists no longer. Most of the Palmerston North group are now in the Institute of Information Sciences and Technology with computer scientists and technologists. At Albany statisticians are still grouped with mathematicians in an Institute that looks a little like our short lived Faculty of Information and Mathematical Sciences. Jeff Hunter is now at Albany as head of this Institute. After three years without a full Professor of Statistics we look forward to the arrival of Graham Wood in September. Dick Brook, who has had the stressful job of holding statistics together over this period of restructuring, hopes to retire later in the year.
In the next NZMS newsletter I will report on the beneficial effects of all these changes.
Greg Arnold
UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO
Department of Mathematics
We welcome Ali Jaballah to our department as a half-time lecturer for 1998. His research interests are in commutative ring theory and fuzzy sets with applications to algebraic structures. He is originally from Tunisia, but did his postgraduate studies in Germany and was a Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland before joining us. He is fluent in English, Arabic, French, and German.
With Ali's arrival and Ingrid Melchert also being half-time this year, our department currently has eight full-time equivalent academic staff members. This is a significant drop on the ten and a half we had at the beginning of last year.
Douglas Bridges was in Calcutta for two weeks in late January to early February as the Rani and Asutosh Ganguli Visiting Professor. While there, he delivered several lectures gathered together under the title "Constructivity in Mathematics". Douglas also conducted a two-hour seminar for the Calcutta Logic Circle. In early April, a reception was held here to mark the publication of his book titled "Foundations of Real and Abstract Analysis".
Ian Craig is still on study leave. He has been in Hamilton for the first few months of the year, but has recently gone to the USA where he will be spending time in Montana and the University of New Hampshire in Durham.
Our senior computing laboratory used by students in both mathematics and statistics has recently been upgraded. The new layout is a vast improvement on what we had previously. Also, ten new PC's running a mixture of Linux and Windows NT have been installed. The upgraded laboratory will be of great benefit to students in their course work and research.
Seminars
A. Jaballah, "The number of intermediary rings in normal pairs".
O. Braun (Institute of Theoretical Physics, Kiev), "Traffic jams and hysteresis in driven one-dimensional systems".
D. Nield (University of Auckland), "Fluid flow in a saturated porous medium".
M. Vlach (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), "Local approximations in optimization theory".
S. Fanelli (University of Rome), "Finding fast and efficient solutions of linear systems of general type".
D. Bridges, "The weak operator topology and the existence of adjoints".
Stephen Joe
__________
Department of Statistics
Dave Whitaker has recently returned from his leave, spent at the University of Lancaster. He spent his leave working with Michael Wright on methods in optimisation. Judi McWhirter is currently on leave. She is spending part of her leave working at Invermay (Dunedin) with Roger Littlejohn on the application of the EM algorithm to fitting models for pulsatile data.
Visiting the department is Hans Hockey, statistics graduate and former biometrician at Ruakura. Hans is a statistical consultant who does work for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals in the UK and collaborates with researchers from the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) who are interested in participatory research in developing countries. During his stay he is working with Ray Littler in the Waikato Centre for Applied Statistics. Hans will be here until the end of March 1998 when he and his wife Tracey and sons Thomas and Michael (born here very recently) will be returning to the UK.
The department welcomes Sharon Gunn who replaces Jane Andrew as a tutor. Sharon is on a 10 month contract. She is currently involved in a Masters research thesis at Monash University in Melbourne which will be upgraded later this year to a PhD. Her research area is the development of cultural curriculum for statistics and as part of her research she will be tutoring in the management statistics course that Professor Nye John has implemented. During her time at Waikato, she will be under the tutelage of Andy Begg in the Science, Mathematics and Technology Education Centre.
Two of our senior students have recently completed Masters Degrees, both with First Class Honours. Max Whitaker's completed dissertation is entitled "An application of Arc Routing to Rural Delivery Routes" and Ben Bolstad's dissertation is entitled "Comparing some Iterative Methods of Parameter Estimation for Censored Gamma Data".
Judi McWhirter
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY
School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences
Life goes on here at MCS, one year after restructuring the departments of Mathematics, Computer Science, the Mathematics and Science Education Unit and the Institute of Statistics and Operations Research into the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences. We await with interest the impact of our new VC's arrival at Easter.
One outcome of the amalgamation is the proposal for our first joint-venture course, Social and Historical Impact of the Computational Sciences. It will be taught by staff from all of the groups in the School. It is about the computational sciences rather than in them, and will examine historical, cultural and social implications of key developments. There is escalating pressure to account for everything in dollar terms, and to increase student to staff ratios in the mathematics and statistics disciplines. Computer Science has more students than it can handle, creating interesting tensions within the School. The planning for the 1998 New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium is going smoothly. So it has been busy for most of us, and here are some of the highlights:
Vistors include David Reed Solomon, recently out of his PhD from Cornell University to work with Rod Downey for four months, before taking up a postdoc at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. He is supported by a Marsden Fund grant. Rod went to visit the University of Western Florida, Berkeley and UCLA late in January.
Professor Dominic Welsh, Chairman of the Mathematics Institute at Oxford, visited Geoff Whittle for 3 weeks. He gave a seminar on his work on the computational complexity of the Jones knot polynomial. Jim Geelen, University of Waterloo, Ontario, visited Geoff for 3 weeks in February, and James Oxley, Louisiana State University, will visit Geoff for 1 week in May.
Professor Mike Fellows from Canada visited with Geoff Whittle and Rod Downey for three months this year, funded by the Marsden Fund.
Vladimir Pestov performed a Mediterranean journey from November 1997 to January 1998 as a two-months chunk of his research and study leave: he held a one-month Visiting Professorship at SISSA - International Institute for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy, a one-month CNR Visiting Professorship at the Group of Mathematical Physics, University of Genoa, Italy, and spent two weeks at The Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
For the most part of his journey, Vladimir was accompanied by Irene and their two children. Irene visited the Geothermal Institute in Pisa and gave a seminar talk, and also delivered a talk at The Ben-Gurion University.
In Trieste Vladimir and Irene met ex-Victoria mathematics honours graduate Finlay Thompson, who is successfully pursuing at SISSA his PhD studies of geometrical aspects of theoretical physics, speaking rather fluent Italian (though his small children Isabella and Joel are already much better at it), and hoping to eventually come back to Wellington.
Warren Moors has been appointed as a Research Fellow to work with Vladimir Pestov on his Supergeometry Marsden project.
Phillip Rhodes-Robinson has returned from 14 months Research and Study Leave in Manchester. Jim Neyland leaves the School for a Senior Lectureship in the School of Education here at VUW. Thora Blithe takes early retirement in April this year. Peter Donelan takes over the duties of Mathematics Programme director from Lindsay Johnston this year.
Steffan Berridge has completed a Master of Financial Mathematics degree, the first such degree to be awarded here at VUW.
Stephen Binns has a scholarship to do a Phd at Penn State University.
Freda Goodall is just completing her PhD and has this to say about her work:
My dissertation subject is: The development of individualised diagnostic tests in mathematics for use with seven to fourteen year old students by teachers in order to give such focused teaching as will make mathematics recovery possible in order to enable students to become proficient in mathematics knowledge and the skills involved.
I am intending to send my work away for examination during April 1998. I have sent three papers away based on my dissertation research. They are :
Proof of the reliability of the individualised diagnostic tests in mathematics for students with from three to nine years schooling.
The importance of validity in test construction and how to test for it in individualised diagnostic tests in mathematics.
An investigation into the use of active reading skills in individualised mathematics diagnostics and their impact on mathematics education.
As part of my work I have directed the making of two video films. One is an 8 minutes video which has been entered in the Video Maths Competition being held in Berlin, August 1998. The other is a 35 minute video film for teacher education in how to conduct the diagnostics. Both videos include ideas for changing mathematics teaching so that it follows the best teaching methods used in other subjects and can be described as holistic, or humanistic, in its approach. The videos are both called "Children Love To Learn".'
My concern is for the below average assessments in mathematics of middle school age children, and third form students in New Zealand when compared with world standards, together with the low assessments of Maori and Pacific Island students .(IEA, 1987, TIMSS, 1996,1997, Garden, 1984.) I taught in a predominantly Maori school on the East Coast of New Zealand in the seventies where every class had students achieving in the 90th percentile in the N.Z.C.E.R P.A.T. tests in mathematics. I did not experience similar results in any of the other schools I taught in throughout my teaching career.
Wherever I work with children and students they ask the following question: 'Why do we have to learn Maths?' This indicates a failure on the part of the adult population to see the relevance of this major discipline which opens so many avenues for highly paid employment. I am interested in developing an interest in mathematics, among our preschoolers, as was done in reading. This to be followed up with mathematics classes taught in a holistic way which would make them relevant to the child and the student".
Mark McGuinness