Number 86     December 2002

NEWSLETTER

OF THE

NEW ZEALAND MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY (INC.)

Contents

PUBLISHER’S NOTICE
EDITORIAL
PRESIDENT’S COLUMN
LOCAL NEWS
FEATURES
CENTREFOLD Vernon Squire
BOOK REVIEWS
CONFERENCES
NOTICES
NZMS APPLICATIONS FOR FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE
Application for Mmebership of the NZMS

MATHEMATICAL MINIATURE 19 Bradman, Beethoven, Brown and Bolt

ISSN 0110-0025

PUBLISHER'S NOTICE

This newsletter is the official organ of the New Zealand Mathematical Society Inc. This issue was assembled and printed at Massey University. The official address of the Society is:

The New Zealand Mathematical Society,
c/- The Royal Society of New Zealand,
P.O. Box 598, Wellington, New Zealand.

However, correspondence should normally be sent to the Secretary:

Dr Shaun Hendy
Industrial Research Limited
Gracefield Research Centre
P O Box 31310, Lower Hutt
s.hendy@irl.cri.nz

NZMS Council and Officers

Newsletter Correspondents

Web Sites

The homepage of the New Zealand Mathematical Society with URL address:
http://www.math.waikato.ac.nz/NZMS/NZMS.html (Webmaster: stephenj@math.waikato.ac.nz)
The newsletter is available at: http://IFS.massey.ac.nz/mathnews/NZMSnews.shtml
Editorial enquiries and items for submission to this journal should be submitted as text or files to r.mclachlan@massey.ac.nz

EDITORIAL

WE COME FROM THE LAND OF ICE AND SNOW...

As always when traveling, the similarities can be more surprising than the differences. So it is with Norway, where I am spending nine months on sabbatical at the Center for Advanced Study in Oslo. Norway has 4.5m people and often considered to be cold and relatively remote. The people, although not as exuberant as their Danish neighbours, are unpretentious and very happy with their society and traditions. They are proud of their scientific history: in mathematics, not only Abel and Lie, but also Sylow, Thue, Stø rmer, and Skolem. The flame of Abel, in particular, is kept burning very brightly, as very quickly a lack of state support was blamed for his early death. You'll hear even more about him in 2003 when the Abel Prize for lifetime achievement in mathematics, backed by a $50m government endowment, is awarded for the first time¹. A fine 20 krø ne coin has just been issued to celebrate his bicentenary, although I haven't had one in my change yet.

In some ways, Norway is even more like the New Zealand of old than of today: a sweeping right to roam the countryside has been retained, and even a right to gather wild food on private land; baches are extremely common, but are still usually simple one room huts. One big difference, of course, is that Norway has a per capita income about three times that of New Zealand, plus a huge Oil Fund for the future. But high taxes and a high cost of living reduce this apparent difference.

The Norwegian Research Council recently commissioned a review of mathematics and computer science in Norwegian universities, from an entirely international panel. Their report makes the overall situation sound very similar to New Zealand: Norway currently has 154 university mathematicians and statisticians. Their quality is excellent but there are too few graduate and undergraduate students to support the economy and even too few to replace the university staff as they retire: 54 staff are aged 55 and above. Like New Zealand, Norway under-invests in research, spending 1.7% of GDP on R&D (New Zealand, 0.9%; OECD, 2.2%; USA, 2.7%). Its economy, based on oil, fish, and timber, is largely extractive, reducing the number of research jobs. Low salaries and a perceived remote location make it hard to attract foreign staff, and it is hard to get quick decisions on PhD and postdoc positions. So it seems that even one of the richest countries in the world in not immune to these widespread problems.

The recommendations are quite specific, endorsing the Centres of Excellence that have been created (!) and the CAS where I am now². Departments should act strategically when whole groups are about to retire. Research groups (as opposed to individuals) should be encouraged, and their research, when it has drifted into less important areas, should be strategically focussed. The best departments (e.g. NTNU in Trondheim) should hire more staff-amazingly, it seems that this last is to be acted on immediately.

The report considers the age distribution a cause for concern. If so, then that concern should be widespread! I gathered a little data from the US (http://www.ams.org/cbms/cbmssurvey-whole.pdf, year 2000, includes 15471 staff) and NZ. Thanks to all who responded to my request for information. I was able to get data on 88.5 staff which shows that the distributions in all 3 countries are very similar, and all have a median age of about 51. Within NZ, there are some wide variations: Auckland, median age 49; Massey PN, 56; Massey Albany (includes stats), 41; Waikato, 46; Otago (includes stats), 53. To me this suggests that, while there is some age bias, the situation is hardly extreme and that in New Zealand, with a little forward planning (and a little help from the NZIMA!), we should be able to smooth our path into the future easily.

Apart from the consolation that we're not alone, one thing I learnt from this report is that reviews and panels can be refreshingly brief and direct, can be entirely free of bumf and boilerplate, and can be taken seriously.

Robert McLachlan
Massey University

¹See www.math.uio.no/abel.html. By visiting the Abel museum at his deathplace Froland Verk, I was even moved to read Called Too Soon by Flames Afar: Niels Henrik Abel and His Times by Arild Stubhaug. In the course of which, to paraphrase Charles Schulz, I learnt more about Abel than I cared to know.

²The 10 year review of the CAS noted that, despite its healthy budget, it hasn't attracted the visitors of Nobel and Fields standard that was hoped; they're even more expensive!

PRESIDENT'S COLUMN

There remains a lot happening in the New Zealand Mathematical scene.

There have been ten new Marsden grants this year, including three new fast starts, and a number of new faces. The NZIMA money has been allocated all around the country, and in areas from modeling to logic to the Olympiad. Everyone is encouraged to apply for the next round of funding. See Marston's article in the newsletter. Two prominent New Zealand mathematicians have been appointed to personal chairs around the country, congratulations Mike Steel and Robert McLachlan. Also two prominent New Zealand mathematicians have been recognized by Royal Society of New Zealand for their contributions and have been elected to the Fellowship: congratulations Graham Weir and Robert McLachlan (who is thus doubly congratulated). We have also elected another Fellow of the New Zealand Mathematical Society, which will be announced at the Auckland Colloquium. New Zealand also did well at the Math Olympiad obtaining its highest ever placing of 34th out of 84, and its first ever gold medal to Simon Marshall of Onslow College, Wellington. There are a dedicated group of people involved in this, lead by Michael Albert of Computer Science in Otago.

Discussions with the Israel Mathematical Society have now reached the point where we are arranging the details of an international meeting with them in Wellington for February 2004. Israeli speakers will include Ran Raz (Weizmann Institute), Victor Palamodov (Tel Aviv University) and Janos Makowsky (Technion). Ran recently spoke at the ICM. Shayne Waldron is arranging for some surface approximators to also speak. This should be an exciting meeting. Of course, speaking of meetings, the next big event on the horizon is ICIAM in Sydney next year, within which our colloquium is embedded. Remember we have allocated monies for support of this and look forward to your applications.

Eric Goles, a world renowned mathematician and computer scientist from Chile recently began discussions with us about exchanges and joint meetings. He is essentially the head of Science in Chile and is therefore very influential. He is very keen on developing binational links, especially in mathematical modeling. You should contact me if you are interested. I will keep you posted on developments.

At the colloquium we will see some new faces on the council. This is because three members have finished their terms. I would like to express the Society's thanks to Bill Barton, Robert McLachlan, and Graeme Wake for their efforts on our behalf. Also Charles Semple will remain on the council but not as Secretary, a position he has fulfilled for a long term. I hope to see you at the Colloquium in Auckland.

Rod Downey
Victoria University

LOCAL NEWS

AGRESEARCH

Since the last appearance of an AgResearch contribution I have attended the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology meeting in Milan, giving an invited talk in the symposium on `Recent Advances in Epidemic Modelling' and visited universities at Utrecht, Edinburgh and Oxford. While at Oxford I caught up with two kiwis(?), Rowland Kao and Andrei Korobeinikov. Not to be outdone, Tanya Soboleva visited INRA (Lille), Wageningen University and the Mathematical Biology group at the University of Dundee; and Kumar Vetharaniam visited UC Davis, and the Universities of Missouri-Columbia and Guleph, and attended the ADSA/ASAS/CSAS conference in Quebec, where he presented his models of lactation-nutrition interaction. It is reported that John Casti's seminars at Ruakura, made mathematics more attractive to quite a few biologists.

As I am moving to Albany in January 2003 this is my last dispatch. Ken Louie has volunteered to take over as the AgResearch correspondent for the NZMS.

Mick Roberts

UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

Department of Computer Science

Dr Andre Nies has joined the Computer Science Department as a Senior Lecturer. Andre has interests in Theoretical Computer Science, notably Computational Logic. He was formerly at the University of Chicago.

At the New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium 2002, the NZMS Research Award was presented to Bakhadyr Khoussainov (via his wife Muharram). Cris Calude gave an Invited Lecture on "What is Turing's Halting Problem?".

Cris Calude's graduate text "Information and Randomness: An Algorithmic Perspective" has been published by Springer-Verlag in a second edition, much revised and extended, with Forewords by Gregory J. Chaitin and Arto Salomaa.

Seminars

• Dr Andre Nies, "Lowness properties of reals and randomness".
• James Noble (Victoria University of Wellington), "Patterns as signs".
• Dr Arkadii Slinko (Department of Mathematics), "When is a multiset ordering a Knuth-Bendix ordering?".
• Chris Anderson, "Animusic: a computer animation video album".
• Dr Mark Titchener, "The logistic zipper transform".
• Professor Lutz Priese (University of Koblenz), "Segmentation with the Color Structure Code (CSC)".
• Professor Rick Mugridge, "Test-driven development".
• Ximing Qi, "Process-based discrete event simulation".
• Professor Britta Schinzel (Koblenz University), "Medical imaging and its consequences".
• Dr Franz J. Brandenburg (University of Passau), "Computing and drawing isomorphic subgraphs".

Garry J. Tee

Department of Engineering Science

Andy Philpott and Mike O'Sullivan have been awarded personal chairs.

We have had two new Lecturers on deck from early September. For more information on Rosalind Archer and Charles Unsworth see the New Colleagues Section.

Andrew Pullan and Piaras Kelly have joined David Ryan on sabbatical leave.

Your correspondent has now been teaching courses in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Auckland over a period of 41 years, one year more than Hugh William Segar (Professor of Mathematics from 1894 to 1933).

Don Nield

Department of Mathematics

Vaughan Jones was made an Honorary Fellow of the London Mathematical Society on March 27-the LMS citation is published elsewhere in this Newsletter. The Department and the newly established New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications held a celebration for Vaughan on August 13, before the investiture in Wellington the following day, at which the Governor-General appointed him as Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

Sheena Parnell, who is the Departmental Teaching Fellow for this year, has been appointed as Tutor for The University of Auckland Tertiary Foundation Certificate Programme (formerly known as Wellesley Programme) from the beginning of 2003.

Jianbei An has been promoted to Associate Professor, Bruce Calvert has been promoted to Associate Professor, Colin Fox has been promoted over the Senior Lecturer bar with an extra increment, and Paul Bonnington has been given an extra increment in the Senior Lecturer scale.

The Marsden Fund allocation round for 2002 includes 22 research projects at The University of Auckland, providing them with more than $8.7 million over the next three years. The researchers include Rod Gover (Invariants in analysis and geometry, $100,000 per year) and Shayne Waldron (Surface approximation and visualisation, $50,000 per year). John Butcher has received funding from the NZIMA for a one-year programme in numerical analysis. A key component of this activity will be the ANODE 2003 workshop scheduled for 2003 July 14-18, and the additional funding will make it possible to extend the scope of that workshop in various ways. There will be some money available to assist visitors who wish to spend an extended period in Auckland. There are also funds available to support a one-year postdoctoral position in Auckland.

David Gauld spent a month of special leave in Dijon, Burgogne, France, working with Professor Szymon Dolecki. He gave there a seminar on "Torsion of the group of homeomorphisms of long line powers".

Rod Gover visited Tom Branson at the University of Iowa, Andreas Cap at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute in Vienna, Vladimír Soucek at Charles University in Prague, and Mike Eastwood at the University of Adelaide. Rod spoke at an Australian Mathematical Society meeting at Newcastle, and at the CMA National Research Symposium on Geometrical Analysis and pde at ANU.

Gaven Martin was a visiting Miller Professor at the University of California - Berkeley, where he participated in a Colloquium on The Hilbert-Smith Conjecture and Nonlinear PDEs.

Arkadii Slinko gave a talk "On Asymptotic Coalitional Manipulability" at the 6th International Conference of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, held at Caltech; and on "Multisets and Utilities" (jointly with Murat Sertel) at the 2nd International Conference of the Society for Economic Design, held at New York, both in July 2002.

James Sneyd gave two invited talks at the Santa Fe Institute, as part of a conference on complexity in biology. As a result of those talks, Don Bers (Loyola University, Chicago) and James received funding from the Santa Fe Institute, to support a joint study of calcium dynamics in cardiac cells.

Jiling Cao and Mark Harmer have each been awarded a New Zealand Science & Technology Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Foundation for Research, Science & Technology. This is a three-year fellowship, which pays salary plus an additional amount for travel and other research expenses. Jiling will be based here from September 2002 to August 2005, mentored by David Gauld. Mark also intends to hold this fellowship here, working mainly with Boris Pavlov and Gaven Martin, but he will also spend some of the time working with others overseas.

Hyuck Chung has completed his PhD (supervised by Colin Fox), and he is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Congratulations to Renu Choudhary on being awarded a University Doctoral Scholarship.

Our secretary Min-Young Lee has won a University Staff Scholarship, to enable her to continue her studies for the Graduate Diploma in Business.

Professor Jari Kaipio (Kuopio University), who works on inverse problems and time series analysis, is visiting from September 2002 until May 2003. Dr Pierre Leone (University of Geneva), who works on numerical analysis and scientific computation, is visiting the Tamaki campus from September 2002 to July 2003. Steffen Schulz (Humboldt University, Berlin), who works on algebraic-differential equations, is visiting from November 2002 to July 2003. Professor Rob Wilson (University of Birmingham), who works on group theory, representation theory and computer algebra, is visiting from November 2002 until January 2003.

Recent visitors include Professor Kari Astala (University of Helsinki), Professor Chris Breen (University of Cape Town), Professor Jon Carlson (University of Georgia - Athens), Professor Derek Holt (University of Warwick), Doojin Hong, Professor Edgar Knobloch (University of Leeds), Professor Tsugunori Nogura (Ehime University), Professor Vladimir Oleinik (St Petersburg University), Dr Akiko Shima (Tokai University), and Professor William Ugalde (University of Iowa).

Mike Thomas and David Tall (of Warwick University) have edited "Intelligence, Learning and Understanding in Mathematics: A Tribute to Richard Skemp", published by Post Pressed, Flaxton, Queensland in 2002. That book of essays celebrates the life and works of Richard R. Skemp, pioneer mathematics educator, empirical researcher, textbook author, theoretical thinker and practical teacher, who was the first to truly integrate the disciplines of psychology, mathematics and education. It has contributions relating to Richard's work by Zoltan P. Dienes, Pierre van Hiele, Efraim Fischbein & Bracha Muzicant, Bruce Harrison, Gary Davis, Eddie Gray, Michael Mitchelmore & Paul White, John Olive & Les Steffe, David Pimm, Anna Sfard, Kaye Stacey & Mollie MacGregor, David Tall, Michael Thomas, and two classic papers by Richard Skemp himself.

The New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium 2002 was held here, on December 2 to 5. Gaven Martin gave an Invited Lecture on "Automorphisms of lattices and tilings of hyperbolic 3-space, solving the Hurwitz-Siegel problem in 3 dimensions". Members of this Department gave the following Contributed Talks:

• Willy V. Alangui, "Stone walls and mathematics: searching for connections".
• Jianbe An, "Ugo's invariant conjecture for general linear and unitary groups".
• Bill Barton, "Undergraduate ESOL students: What difference does language make to their mathematics learning?"
• C. Paul Bonnington, "Toroidal triangulations are geometric".
• John C. Butcher, "Taking the right steps".
• Bruce Calvert, "Multiterminal resistors and monotonicity".
• Robert Chan, "Cheap computation of Hamiltonian problems in quadratic form".
• Marston Conder, "Regular Cayley maps for finite groups".
• Jianhua Gong & Gaven Martin, "Strongly quasiconformal homogeneity".
• Rod Gover, "Cartan, de Rham and quantum gravity".
• Paul R. Hafner, "Constructing the Higman-Sims graph".
• Junying Huang, "Implementation of stiff general linear method".
• Vivien Kirk & Alan Champneys (University of Bristol), "Wiggly homoclinic bifurcation curves near saddle-node/Hopf instabilities".
• Pierre Leone, "Numerical calculation to understand long-term qualitative behaviour of numerical solution of ODE".
• Li-Chen Liu, "Rankings of minisets of cardinality three".
• Alastair McNaughton, "Abel function transforms".
• Nicolette Moir, "Derivation of a class of ODE solvers".
• Geoff Nicholls, "Building and fitting a model of human language change".
• Eamonn O'Brien, "Constructing the automorphism group of a $p$-group".
• Greg Oates, "Integrating technology into undergraduate mathematics courses".
• Ivan L. Reilly, "Topological concepts and language".
• Kieran Robert & Boris Pavlov, "Resonance optical switch: calculation of the resonance eigenvalues".
• Steffen Schulz, "On circuit simulation and abstract differential algebraic equations".
• Gabriela Slezáková, "Obstructions to clustered planarity in directed graphs".
• Arkadii Slinko, "How large a coalition should be to manipulate an election?"
• Jamie Sneddon, "Obstructions to clustered planarity in directed graphs".
• Steve Taylor, "The boundary feedback stabilisation of a string-mass system".
• Garry J. Tee, "Solving elliptic partial differential equations, without factorization".
• Krasimira T. Tsaneva-Atanasova, "A mathematical study of systolic calcium oscillations".
• Priscilla Tse, "The Runge-Kutta-Munthe-Kaas method for the rigid body problem".
• William Wright, "Practical general linear methods".
• Tskasa Yashiro, "Crossing numbers of surface-knots".
• Kaimin Zhang, "The properties of K-subgroup".

Seminars

• Professor William Ugalde (University of Iowa), "Differential forms canonically associated to even-dimensional compact conformal manifolds".
• Professor Tsugunori Nogura (Ehime University, Matsuyama), "Non-normality numbers", and "Spaces with maximal selections".
• Professor Jiang Shouli (Shandong University), "Filter-Frechet vs. strongly filter-Frechet".
• Moira Statham, "Investigating the added value of the Wellesley Programme mathematics course".
• Professor Charles Leedham-Green (Queen Mary College, University of London), "Recognition of matrix groups".
• Dr Akiko Shima (Tokai University), "The 2-twist-spun trefoil has the triple point number four", and "State-sum invariants of classical knots".
• Dr Jim Geelen (NZMS Visiting Speaker, University of Waterloo), "An algebraic matching algorithm".
• Dr Arkadii Slinko, "Asymptotic properties of voting procedures".
• Professor Edgar Knobloch (University of Leeds), "Bursts".
• Professor Chris Breen (University of Cape Town), "Fear of mathematics".
• Associate Professor Mike Steel (University of Canterbury), "Phylogenetic trees and rapidly evolving diseases".
• Assoc Prof Bill Barton & Prof Ivan Reilly, "Topological concepts and Language".
• Peter Fox (Texas Instruments, Australia), "Graphic Calculator technology and pedagogical change".
• Dr Jane Watson (University of Tasmania), "Tasmanian research in chance and data".
• Professor Derek Holt (University of Warwick), "The Dehn function of nilpotent groups".
• Professor Jon Carlson (University of Georgia - Athens), "Classification of endo-trivial modules", and "Representation theory: the big picture".
• Dr Maxine Pfannkuch, "Development of students' statistical thinking: Designing a framework for research in the classroom".
• Dr Paul Hafner, "The graphs of Hoffman-Singleton and Higman-Sims".
• Dr Jiling Cao, "Pseudocompact spaces and Ginsburg's questions".
• Shehenaz Adam, "Ethnomathematics in the Maldivian curriculum".
• Dr Nicholas F. Dudley Ward, "The zero set problem for the Bergman spaces", and "Wavelets".
• Mala Nataraj, "Vedic mathematics", and "Mathematics in South Indian classical music".
• Dr Sina Greenwood, "Type I manifolds".
• Viliami Latu, "A case study of two Pacific Island senior mathematics students: Is their motivation shaped by their culture?"
• Jerry Lane, "Mathematics and local government".
• Professor David Gauld, "Long line knots".
• Willy Alangui, "Back from the field: Searching for connections between stone walls and mathematics".
• Carolyn Vela, "Computers and internet use in primary mathematics".

Garry J. Tee

Department of Statistics

Mik Black has arrived as a Lecturer: see the item about him in the New Colleagues Section.

Andrew Sporle will be employed for the next four years on a Uniservices contract, working with Alastair Scott and Peter Davis on a PGSF-funded project. The project will be investigating innovative ways of using routine data, to monitor family and whanau well-being over time. Andrew is a quantitative sociologist who has been, amongst other things, Maori Health Research Manager for the HRC, Research Fellow in the Departments of Preventive and Social Medicine at the University of Otago and of Public Health & General Practice at the Christchurch Medical School, and a part-time lecturer in Maori and Pacific Health at Auckland. Welcome to the department, Andrew!

Chris Wild will be Head of Department, after Alan Lee finishes his term at the end of January 2003.

Monique Mackenzie, a PhD student in this Department, has just landed a tenure-track lectureship in the Maths/Stats department at St Andrew's University in Scotland. Her thesis, on the use of parametric and innovative semiparametric non-linear mixed models in forestry (supervisor Brian McArdle) is still incomplete, and so the pressure is on to finish. She did her MSc thesis (also on parametric non-linear mixed models for forestry growth data) in the School of Biological Sciences, then moved up to Statistics at the same time as Brian McArdle. Monique and Carl Donovan, another of Brian McArdle's PhD students, were married on 2002 November 30th and both will go to St Andrew's, where there is a strong probability of Carl being given a Post-Doc. This event strengthens the already strong ties between the Wildlife and Ecology Statistics group at St Andrew's and the corresponding group in the Department of Statistics at Auckland.

There is a lesson here for the administrations of New Zealand Universities. Monique was interviewed by video conferencing at 8.30 pm in NZ (9.30 am in St Andrew's), and she had the job offer by 8.00 the next morning.

Seminars

• Markus Neuhauser (University of Otago), "Adaptive interim analyses with application to a weighted location-scale test".
• Dr Jock MacKay (University of Waterloo), "What is statistical method?"
• Dr Mik Black, "Statistical issues in the design and analysis of spotted microarray experiments".
• Dr Granville Tunnicliffe-Wilson (University of Lancaster), "An extension of vector autoregressions".
• Professor Rafail Khasminskii (Wayne State University), "On on-line estimation of a smooth regression function".
• Professor David Vere-Jones (Victoria University of Wellington), "Entropy scoring revisited: a second look at assessing point process forecasts".
• Dr Paul Murrell, "STATS 220: Some lessons learned about Web-based teaching".
• Professor Raymond J. Carroll (Texas A&M University), "Variability is not always a nuisance parameter".

Applied Probability & Applied Mathematics Joint Seminars

• Professor Edgar Knobloch (University of Leeds), "Structurally stable heteroclinic cycles in Rayleigh-Benard convection".
• Dr Alona Ben-Tal (Bio-Engineering Institute), "Towards a mathematical model for cardio-respiratory systems".
• Dr Don McNickle (University of Canterbury), "Some aspects of correlations in queues".
• Professor Ezra Zeheb (Technion, Haifa), "Control of systems under uncertainty condition".
• Paul Shorten (AgResearch, Ruakura), "Predictive modelling of populations growth, spread and competition. From food/crop safety to GMO risk".
• Dr Charles Semple (University of Canterbury), "Combining evolutionary trees with dated ancestors".
• Golbon Zakeri (Engineering Science), "Estimation of market distribution functions in the electricity market".
• Dr Sean Oughton (University of Waikato), "Heating the solar atmosphere: from 6000 Kelvin to a million Kelvin using wave-driven turbulence".
• Will Wright (Department of Mathematics), "General linear methods with inherent Runge-Kutta stability".

Garry J. Tee

UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Congratulations to Jean Zhaojing Gong who has been awarded a New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (NZIMA) PhD scholarship for 3 years. Jean's thesis is entitled "Improved statistical methods for modelling health outcomes - application to clinical efficacy and equity of access". Jean's supervisor will be Irene Hudson with Patrick Graham (Christchurch School of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Otago) as associate supervisor.

Graeme Wake and Mark McGuinness (Victoria University of Wellington) are co-leading an international team of four, charged with developing a post-graduate program in the well-known Industrial and Applied Mathematics in the Korean Advanced Institute for Science and Technology over the next 3 years. This will involve industrial problem workshops. The other team members are from Australia and Canada. Funded by KAIST, this will be a major initiative for the region and it is intended to develop links with the newly formed Centre for Mathematics in Industry established recently by Massey University on their Albany campus. Involvement with the Australian based Mathematics in Industry study groups which shift to New Zealand for a period from early 2004 will also be facilitated. As with Industry here, the Korean interest includes problems from the biological, environmental and medical areas. The NZ members will visit for periods of one or two months to fit in with their commitments here.

Professor Phillippe Toint, University of Namur, Belgium, will be a Visiting Erskine Fellow to the Department from 31 January until 30 April 2003. Professor Toint will be giving a series of lectures as part of the 4th year Optimization paper, and research seminars. Professor Toint is Professor of Mathematics, co-ordinator of the Numerical Analysis Unit, and Director of the Transportation Research Group at Namur. He is an international figure in optimization and will be lecturing on Trust-Region Methods, the work in his book (SIAM, 2000). Further information on Professor Toint including publications may be found on his web page http://www.fundp.ac.be/~phtoint/toint.html

Seminars

• Professors Peter Hilton and Jean Pedersen (Binghamton University, State University of New York, and Santa Clara University ), "The Birth of Homological Algebra", "Preliminary Talk on Paper-Folding", "Paper-Folding and its Relation to Geometry", "New Results in Elementary Number Theory Derived from Paper-Folding", "The Polya Enumeration Theorem and Polya Homologues".
• Jeremy Levesley (Leicester University), "Approximation on Spheres".
• Professor Tim David, "Activation and Extinction Models for Platelet Adhesion".
• Britta Basse, "Cell cycle modelling of human melanoma tumors".
• Professor John Casti (Santa Fe Institute and University of Vienna), "The Geometry of Data" and "BizSim - the uses of complexity science in the world of business and simulation".
• Dr G. Tunnicliffe Wilson (Lancaster University), "Modelling Statistical Extremes", "The Kalman Filter", "Spectral Analysis", "Extended Autoregressive Models".
• Peter T. Cummings (Vanderbilt University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory), "Visualizing Complex Physical and Chemical Phenomena at the Molecular Level".
• Dr James Geelen (University of Waterloo), "An algebraic matching algorithm".
• Professor Rod Downey (Victoria University of Wellington), "Parameterized Complexity: recent thoughts".
• John Haywood (Victoria University of Wellington), "Improved parametric models for evolutionary seasonal patterns or other cycles".
• Rua Murray (University of Waikato), "A `minimum energy' approach to invariant densities in dynamical systems".
• Philip Meguire, "New Foundations As Seen from the Boundaries".
• John Crequer (Statistics New Zealand), "Benchmarking with the Kalman Filter".
• Adjunct Associate Prof Rey Casse (University of Adelaide), "Finite geometry and secret sharing schemes".
• Bruce van Brunt (Massey University), "Holomorphic Solutions to Advanced Functional Differential Equations and Complex Dynamics".

Charles Semple

INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH LIMITED

Applied Mathematics Team

Graham Weir was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in November. The citation reads as follows: " Dr Weir has applied mathematics to practical problems of considerable importance to New Zealand. He has made significant contributions to our understanding of mineral exploration, granular flows in industrial processes, underground storage of greenhouse gases, and lahar flows." Most applied mathematicians, and many pure mathematicians, will be aware of the quality of Graham's work and of the leadership he brings to New Zealand Mathematics.

We have two summer students with us this year. Joanna Atkin returns this summer, after completing her BSc(Hons) in Physics at Victoria. Joanna will be working with Shaun Hendy on modelling the formation of oxide films. Heremaia Tangihaere has just completed his BSc in Maths and Physics at Waikato. Heremaia will be working mainly with John Burnell on geothermal modelling.

Roger Young is an Associate Investigator on one of IRL's successful Marsden bids this year entitled "Bridging length scales: the application of crystal plasticity to metal fatigue." The Principal Investigator is Dr David Knowles from the Materials Performance Technologies Team at IRL.

The MacDiarmid Institute high-performance computing facility is up and running at Applied Maths. The new computer, hoiho.irl.cri.nz, is a rack-mounted 46-node Linux cluster and will be used by materials scientists in the CoRE to model materials and analyse experimental data. There will be some CPU time available for external users - for further details contact Shaun Hendy (s.hendy@irl.cri.nz).

Graham Weir gave a poster on "Hopper Discharge" at the AIChE meeting in Indianapolis in November. Steve White attended a meeting in Kyoto, GHGT6, on Greenhouse Gas Reduction and the annual meeting of the American Geological Union in Denver. Graham Weir and Shaun Hendy attended the Manawatu-Wellington Applied Maths Meeting. Shaun gave a talk on "Mathematical Modelling at the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology."

Shaun Hendy

MASSEY UNIVERSITY

Institute of Fundamental Sciences (Palmerston North)

Mathematics

Semester 2 (13 weeks) has been a busy time with only one week `break' as we had many Extramural courses running so as a matter of fact we did not have a break at all! It is rather surprising that we could not have a break of two weeks as in Semester 1. There was a day of intersection for the courses and thanks to the generosity of the Institute this fact was celebrated with a lunch for the Mathematics students and staff.

Robert McLachlan has just pulled off a unique treble. Not only has he gained a Personal Chair this year, together with money from Marsden Fund, but also recently he was elected a Fellow of Royal Society of New Zealand. Congratulations Robert!

Also congratulations to Igor Boglaev who has been promoted to Associate Professor.

And finally our congratulations to Margaret Walshaw of the Department of Technology, Science and Mathematics Education who has been granted \$100,000 to investigate what growing up and succeeding at school means for young women in today's changing professional world. Jonathan Marshall's contract as a Tutor has been extended by a year.

Robert McLachlan writes that he can see a birch tree, a little corner of sky, and a huge snow bank from his basement office in Oslo. He gave a series of lectures at the Summer School on Geometric Integration in Fevik (on the "Norwegian Riviera"), another in a converted pigsty in the middle of Norway, and spoke at the Workshop on Innovative Integrators for PDEs at the CWI in Amsterdam.

Professor Jim Geelen (University of Waterloo) visited us for a few days in late September as the New Zealand Mathematical Society Visiting Speaker. We enjoyed his company and his very interesting seminar (see under seminars).

Peter Kelly attended two conferences at the beginning of July held in Auckland. These conferences were: "The Bridging Mathematics Network 10th Conference, 2002, and MERGA 25".

Mike Carter, Tammy Smith, Kee Teo and Gillian Thornley received a grant from Massey's Fund for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching to produce web-based Algebra (review) tutorials for Science, Technology, Agriculture and Business students.

On the last day of the extramural week, Massey hosted the 5th Manawatu-Wellington Applied Mathematics Conference. The event was organized by Igor Boglaev and Marijcke Vlieg-Hulstman. There was a good attendance and many interesting talk. We like to thank the NZ ANZIAM branch for sponsoring the morning-and afternoon teas. It was good to see members coming as far north as Auckland (John Butcher) and as far south as Christchurch (Graeme Wake).

Tammy Smith has spent a fortnight in Melbourne at the CSIRO Health Sciences and Nutrition, Parkville working with Vidana Epa, Structural Biology.

It is unfortunate that many of us will not be able to attend the Colloquium 2002 hosted by the University of Auckland. Semester 3 has already sprung upon us and many of us are involved in some ways or are on leave such as Robert McLachlan and Kee Teo or have other engagements.

John Hudson, Charles Little, Serguei, Keeta (latest PhD student of Charles), Barbara Holland, Paul Gardner and James Matheson (to be enrolled next year to start a PhD with Mike Hendy) will be attending the NZMRI Workshop on Combinatorics and Combinatorial Aspects of Biology held at New Plymouth, January 4-11, 2003.

Kee Teo left a few weeks ago for Singapore (mid-November to mid-February) to work with Professor Koh of the National University of Singapore and Associate Professor Dong of Nanyang Technological University on Chromatic Polynomials. The bad thing is that it is here very quiet without Kee but the good thing is that he did not get lost on the way and safely arrived in Singapore on the scheduled time. And as Kee wrote: "The plane did not lose any parts...".

Charles Little, Serguei and Sven Hartmann (Information Systems) will be attending the 27th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing held at the University of Newcastle during December 9-13, 2002.

The Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution (AWC) is now well under way, with several of its members being from IFS. Mike Hendy as a co-director, together with PhD student Paul Gardner and computer specialist Tim White, have been relocated to the top of Science Tower D, to join the biological science members of the AWC at Massey. Our former PhD student Barbara Holland, has returned from a year in Germany, having just been awarded a three-year NZS&T Postdoctoral Fellowship. Several new mathematics PhD students and post-docs are expected to join them over the next few months. Their new computer laboratory is now full of with visitors and several summer students joining the crew. At the time of writing, the AWC's parallel computer facility, "Helix", a Beowulf cluster of 66 dual processors is being commissioned. The computer scientists at Massey's Albany campus have constructed this facility. It has already been benchmarked as #304 in the world top 500 rankings (see http://www.top500.org/list/2002/11/) with a LinPak test run of 234.8 Gflops, more than twice the speed of the next reported NZ computer. Several of our members have programs ready to implement on Helix; the race is on to see who will be the first to produce some useful results.

An introductory training course will be run at Albany January 28-31, and will be open to other potential research users in the NZ mathematical community. Applications to attend this course should be made to our Business Manager, Susan Wright (S.M.Wright@massey.ac.nz). Potential attendees should see the website http://iims.massey.ac.nz/events/helixworkshop.html for details, which include grants to students who do not have acess to funds to attend.

Professor Judith Kinnear (Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney) has been appointed as our new Vice Chancellor and is expected to take up the position early next year. Although she will be based at the Palmerston North campus, Professor Kinnear is expected to be a regular visitor to Wellington and Auckland.

Seminars

• Professor Mike Hendy, "Undergraduates solve century-old prime number problem".
• Associate Professor Sven Hartmann (Information Science Research Center & Department of Information Systems), "Orthogonal double covers of complete graphs".
• Professor Jim Geelen (New Zealand Mathematical Society Visiting Speaker, University of Waterloo, Canada), "An algebraic matching algorithm".

Graduate Seminar Series

• Associate Professor Igor Boglaev, "Uniform multidomain decomposition for solving convection-diffusion problems".
• Dr Kee Teo, "Zeros of chromatic polynomials".
• Dr Bruce van-Brunt, "Holomorphic solutions to advanced functional equations".
• Paul Gardner, "Optimality in the RNA-world".
• Dr Marijcke Vlieg-Hulstman, "On the remarkable Korteweg-de Vries equation-a brief survey of results".
• Padma Senerath, "Randers metric".
• Adrian Kitson, "On the homotopy and the homoly groups of the classical Lie Groups".
• James Matheson, "Domain decomposition for singularly perturbed problems".

Marijcke Vlieg-Hulstman

Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences (Albany)

Mathematics

Dr Carlo Laing has recently been appointed as a lecturer in the Institute. For more details see the New Colleagues section later in this issue.

Dr Mick Roberts, currently with AgResearch at Wallaceville (Hutt Valley), will join the Institute as Associate Professor of Mathematics from January. Mick has an international reputation for his research as a mathematical biologist. His recent work is in mathematical modelling of epidemics, but he has experience in other applied mathematics applications as well.

Leng Leng Lim has arrived to start a PhD in Mathematics. She has been teaching for the last few years at Singapore Polytechnic but is not a stranger to NZ, having taken out degrees from Waikato and Canterbury.

Professor Kewal Puri has headed off back home to Maine after spending the semester with us. It was a pleasure to have Kewal here; he helped with teaching some Mathematics postgraduate papers, took part in research discussions with several staff, and left us with memories of his good humour and graciousness.

A newly-formed Centre for Mathematics in Industry (CMI) is now based in the Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences. It will initially "sit" alongside the already-established Centre for Mathematical Modelling (CMM), although the CMI may well subsume the CMM in due course. The Director of the CMI is Robert McKibbin, while membership is open to all who consider that all or any part of their activity could be included under the generic title of applied mathematics with industrial applications. As mentioned above, Graeme Wake will take up a position as Adjunct Professor of Industrial Mathematics from March next year; he will be based in the CMI.

Preparation for two major industrial mathematics meetings to be held in Auckland, the Mathematics in Industry Study Groups, MISG2004 and MISG2005, will be focussed within the CMI. It is anticipated that Graeme Wake will be the Director of these two events. The MISG is a Special Interest Group of ANZIAM (Australia and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics) which is a division of the Australian Mathematical Society.

The MISG meetings take the form of workshops where industrial problems are brought for tackling by applied mathematicians and others who like to do such things. Attendance is free, the costs being borne by the industries who offer their problems. Needless to say, a lot of work has to be done to prepare the ground for the workshops, and this is where the CMI and Graeme Wake come in. There will be opportunities to get leverage off the industry connections established for the MISG to make contacts in other scientific areas, so keep your eyes open!

The "roof shout" for our new building took place last week. The clean-up process is already under way, with the large site-crane being dismantled. The Mathematics and Statistics groups will move "up the hill" in the first week of the New Year.

Seminars

• Philip Sharp (University of Auckland), "The restricted three-body problem and its periodic solutions".
• John Butcher (University of Auckland), "Numerical methods for ordinary differential equations in the 20th century".
• Mick Roberts (AgResearch, Wallaceville), "Bandung bugs (The dynamics of dengue) Speaker".
• John Butcher (University of Auckland), "Numerical methods for ordinary differential equations in the 20th century".
• Ron J Litchford (NASA), "Future Space Transportation: A Propulsion Research Perspective".

Mike Meylan

UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Since the last Newsletter most of the department has been incredibly busy. Have you ever noticed how you promise yourself that next year will be easier and it never is? Well 2002 has been the year of all years. We knew of course that the department was going to be reviewed, and Vernon knew about the IAHR conference he was co-organizing, but who would have ever guessed that it was going to be quite as crazy a year as it has turned out.

First the conference - the 16th International Association of Hydraulic Engineering and Research Symposium on Ice. Due to take place in two days as this is being typed, this has involved the production of about 1000 pages of Proceedings to be handed out to the delegates at the conference itself. (Never, ever agree to host a conference that produces a reviewed Proceedings at the time of the conference.) What started out as a nice pleasant get-together of a few friends and colleagues, has turned into something three times the expected size with people attending from Mongolia, China, Japan, Svalbard, Russia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, ... I'll stop but the list goes on and incudes 17 countries. Each person has their own special needs and each doesn't like something! Producing the Proceedings was interesting to say the least. Despite a very clear set of instructions, nobody gets the prize for reading instructions and sticking to them. Manuscripts came in every shape and form including those that crashed Vernon's computer as soon as he tried to open them, and those that were so big that they needed a Cray to display the figures. Making pdf usually saw Vernon turning a screwed up face slightly away from the screen waiting for the crash, which for one out of ten manuscripts required a reboot. Incredibly after a weekend of continuous work the Proceedings got to the Printery, and, what's more, they look great. More next newsletter, but we are hopeful the 16th IAHR Symposium on Ice will be remembered by many as a great conference.

The review was the other pressure that took up a lot of time. Artfully Vernon persuaded Derek that he would enjoy coordinating the preparation of the self-review (something Derek had artfully achieved for the previous review in 1993). Derek did a grand job and took a lot of pressure off Vernon. While Vernon still wrote plenty of dulcet prose, he didn't have the worry of chasing people for their contributions and compiling it. Derek's beard is noticeably grayer for all the work he put in and Vernon now looks all of his 42 years. The actual review went well. The committee were very friendly and very positive and all staff came away from it feeling as though the department was in pretty good shape. Some recommendations were made orally but since these are not yet on paper, we shall wait until next time to tell you what we intend to do.

One item of great news this semester is that Richard Barker was made an Associate Professor. It was well deserved and we are all pleased for him. The Chair of Statistics still remains unfilled but we are hopeful it will be filled soon so that the statistics group can reach its full potential again. Vernon's research for the last several months has involved the challenge of repositioning pieces of paper from the left to the right side of his desk and then back again-oh and editing the Proceedings mentioned above. Fortunately, Tim Williams, a Marsden research student, is doing great things and Gareth is close on producing something interesting too.

Christmas is coming, just need to get that conference behind us, and we can relax.

Richard Barker attended The Wildlife Society annual meeting in Bismarck, North Dakota, to take part in a symposium on application of modern regression methods in wildlife biology. While in the States he took the opportunity to spend a week with Bill Link at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland and also a few days with Gary White at Fort Collins, Colorado.

Peter Fenton visited John Rossi at Virginia Tech for a month during June-July, to continue joint work on a problem in subharmonic functions.

Dr Markus Neuhäuser has been awarded a University of Otago Research Grant in 2003 for a project on studies with adaptive designs, i.e. studies with one or more adaptive interim analyses. These are becoming more and more popular, in particular in clinical research. In this research project it is planned to investigate the usefulness of adaptive methods in different areas. He has also been invited to join the Editorial Board of Communications in Statistics from January 2003.

The Problem Challenge competition, run by John Curran and John Shanks, continues to flourish with over 42000 Intermediate School children entering this year. Despite the extra entries the setters suspect that the standard has increased slightly. The competition comprises five sets of questions each with five questions to be answered in thirty minutes. The two Johns had to set a really tough last set to avoid severe bunching at the top. For the fourth year they have also run the end-of-year Final Challenge competition for the more able children, and having set some really "challenging" questions, they were yet again amazed that there were two perfect scores, and an outstanding result from a child only in year 5. It would be good to follow the progress of these top students and try to veer them towards a mathematical training.

Derek Holton has provided the following comments on his study leave in the first half of this year.

"My wife is glad that I've become interested in mathematics education. She says they have better conferences than mathematicians. What she means by this is that they seem to contrive lavish accommodation in exotic spots. While combinatorialists seem to restrict themselves to university venues at largely college accommodation, in the last couple of years maths education has taken me to Tokyo (where she who counts' was impressed by the shopping) and the Kruger National Park (blown away by the wildlife). Naturally I have devoted myself to the conferences and to me there is no difference between how I work at a graph theory conference or a maths education one. Though I have to say that watching through a window as a hippo pulls itself onto a bank does prove to be somewhat of a distraction when you're trying to give a serious paper.

"In the first six months of this year I was on leave for three months in Melbourne and three months in England. My wife's standard of maths education conferences was not reached at the University of Reading where I spoke at the Maths Association's annual conference. Nor did it help me one evening as we got a taxi downtown for a meal that we were pulled over by a member of the local constabulary. Despite having ordered the taxi through the hotel where we were staying, the cab was apparently unlicensed. It transpired that our driver had somehow managed to intercept the hotel's call and was whisking us off, hopefully, for just the gain of the fare.

"In fact crime seemed to dog us during our period in the Northern Hemisphere. Now I should just point out first that I always tell my wife that she tries to stuff too much into her purse. OK, so she took a side trip to Moscow. (I, of course, stayed in England slaving away on my latest publication.) She somehow got isolated from her tour group during an investigation of the Moscow underground stations, and found herself surrounded by young gypsies. They had quickly discovered that she had a `bum' bag around her waist and were doing their best to check out its contents, presumably just in case she had forgotten to put something in it. But, although they had got the zip undone, their perusal of the contents was hampered by the fact that the valuables were jammed in tight.

"At about this point a passing Moscovite found a novel use of a laptop. Swinging it round his head he advanced on the light-fingered group and drove them off. No one was the worse for wear, though the state of the laptop has never thoroughly been discussed. However, I am told that Moscow is not on my list of venues for a conference of any type.

"But equanimity was regained on the way home when we just happened to find a conference in Crete. We were more than adequately housed in what was a resort rather than a hotel. Several swimming pools spread themselves around the environs and the Mediterranean lapped on a small but adjacent beach. I managed to find one day, after the conference I might add, to lay on the reclining chairs, under the sun umbrellas. I even found the courage to go for a swim. My wife and I were never contenders for an Olympic medal and we watched the waves for a while before venturing off. We had noticed several people a little distance out, apparently resting on a reef. So we decided to go out and join them. On the way we very quickly noted the rapid increase in the depth of the water but we knew there was a reef so why worry. But there was no reef. We suddenly realised that these people who we thought were standing with their feet on a reef were just standing up. You could actually `float' vertically in the water. It was a weird feeling. The salt concentration was obviously sufficiently high that it rendered the arm and leg movements usually required to keep a body afloat, unnecessary. "I won't dwell on the apré-swim delights of men delivering food and drink to your own individual chair and umbrella, nor the heat of the sun or the warmth of the water. Suffice to say that since my return, Dunedin's air temperature has failed to move the mercury as high as the water temperature that day in Crete.

"If any of you are tempted to change disciplines as the result of what I've just said, you might like to consider coming to the Delta '03 conference in Queenstown from November 23 to 27 next year. The conference is in a hotel, Rydges, bordering the mighty Lake Wakatipu and you can be assured of a stimulating period deliberating the virtues and difficulties of mathematics education at university level."

Visitors

Dr Alan Beardon and Mrs Toni Beardon, both of University of Cambridge, England, visited the Department during October and November. Alan worked with Peter Fenton on Geometric function theory, discrete groups, complex dynamics and mathematical economics while Toni worked with Derek Holton on mathematical education. Both Alan and Toni are keen walkers and took the opportunity at weekends to view as much as they could of our scenic South Island.

Seminars

• Gareth Hegarty, "Large amplitude periodic waves beneath an ice sheet".
• Toshikazu Kimura (Graduate School of Economics, Hokkaido University, Japan), "Diffusion approximations for queues with markovian bases".
• Paul R. Wade (National Marine Mammal Laboratory, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Seattle), "Population dynamics and extinction risk of the southern resident killer whale population (Washington and British Columbia): environmental variability or human impacts?"
• Dr Paul Yip (University of Hong Kong), "A unified approach in estimating population size of capture-recapture experiments in continuous time".
• Dr Ted Catchpole (Australian Defence Force Academy), "Modelling the dynamics of a simple large mammal population is not simple".
• Marti Anderson (University of Auckland), "Canonical analysis of principal coordinates: a new point of view".
• Mark Hickman (The University of Canterbury), "From black holes to braided rivers or matching curves under the projective group".
• Darryl MacKenzie (Proteus Research & Consulting Ltd, Dunedin), "Was it there? Analysing species presence/absence data with imperfect species detection".
• Dr John Enlow, "Mathematical modelling of liquid crystal structures".
• Markus Neuhäuser, "A comparison of adaptive procedures and the truncated product method".
• Professor George Seber (Department of Statistics University of Auckland), Special Guest Speaker for Dunedin Statistical Association, "Do statisticians count more than sheep?"
• Professor Jim Geelen (University of Waterloo, Canada) NZMS Visiting Speaker, "Multicommodity flows".
• Laimonis Kavalieris, "Estimating the frequency of oscillation from time series data".
• Ari Samaranayaka, "Effect of environmental variation on models for the dynamics of biological populations".

Mathematics Honours: Project Presentations -

• Katie Enlow, "Simultaneous polynomial root finding using circular arithmetic".
• James Douglas, "On some properties of the ring of linear transformations on a vector space".
• Tim Woodhams, "Modelling sex-ratio altering selfish genetic elements in the Z-W sex chromosome species".

Statistics Honours: Project Presentation -

• Vanessa Cave, "Matrix population models".

StatChat is a regular series of informal presentations on key ideas in statistics aimed specifically at graduate students from other Departments (and interested staff) as well as from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. StatChat to be led by a statistician, with the participants (including other statisticians) contributing to the discussion.

• Joanne McKenzie and Jim Lewsey (Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Otago University), "Model selection methods: Is stepwise unwise?"
• Warren Palmer, "QTL Distributions".
• David Fletcher, "The beauty of logarithms in ANOVA for skewed data".
• David Skegg (Department of Preventive and Social Medicine), "Statistics and epidemiology: a productive marriage?"
• John Williams (Department of Marketing), "Structural equation models for heterogeneous data: a finite mixture model approach".

This talk is one in a series run by the Otago Branch of the NZSA

• Mark Schreiber (Bioinformatics/ Statistics, AgResearch), "The statistics of biological sequence analysis".

Lenette Grant

UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO

Department of Mathematics

We congratulate Rua and Michelle on the birth of their first child. Their daughter Alison was born on 3 November and she weighed 3.26 kg (7lb 4oz).

Congratulations are also due to Sivajah Somasundaram who won the B.H. Neumann Prize for the most outstanding talk presented by a student at the Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society. The title of her prize-winning talk was \textsl{A Gateaux differentiability space that is not weak Asplund}. It was sad to learn that Professor Neumann passed away just a few weeks after presenting the prize to Sivajah.

We also congratulate Ian Craig, Sean Oughton, and Alfred Sneyd on their recent successful application for a Marsden grant. They have received a three-year grant for their project Magnetic reconnection and turbulence in solar coronal plasmas.

Rua is still on study leave, but as may be inferred from above, is physically in Hamilton. Also still on study leave is Kevin Broughan who is due back from New York on Christmas Day.

Recent travellers in the department have been Ernie Kalnins who attended the IV Workshop on Classical and Quantum Integrable Systems held in Cuernavaca (about 85 km south of Mexico City). On a separate trip, Ernie went to the University of Queensland Mathematical Physics Workshop held in Coolangatta. Also crossing the Tasman were Warren Moors and his student Sivajah (mentioned above) who attended the 46th Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society in Newcastle. Stephen Joe and Frances Kuo attended the Fifth International Conference on Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Scientific Computing which was held in Singapore.

Ernie, Alfred, Warren, Sean, and Rua will be attending the mathematics colloquium coming up at the University of Auckland.

Seminars

• M. Domijan, "Applications of fixed point theorems to ordinary differential equations".
• S. Joyce, "Applications of the Baire category theorem to Fourier analysis and the non-differentiability of continuous functions".
• F. Kuo, "Constructing good lattice rules with millions of points-an overview of recent developments".
• C. Voysey, "Viscous damping of periodic water waves".
• G. Blacklock, "Consumer theory".
• J. Geelen (University of Waterloo, NZMS Visiting Lecturer), "An algebraic matching algorithm".
• J. Butcher (University of Auckland, NZMS Visiting Lecturer), "Numerical methods for ordinary differential equations in the 20th century".
• J. Butcher (University of Auckland, NZMS Visiting Lecturer), "Some new methods for stiff and non-stiff problems".
• A. Jaballah (University of Sharjah, UAE), "Integral domains with only finitely many overrings".

Stephen Joe

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON

School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences

Rob Goldblatt visited China in August, serving as the NZ delegate to the General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union in Shanghai before attending the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. He then travelled to the city of Chongqing in the south-west where he was an invited speaker at the 8th Asian Logic Conference.

At the end of September Rob was in France as an invited speaker at the conference Advances in Modal Logic 2002 held in Toulouse. Later he spent the month of November as a visiting fellow at the University of Bolonga, where he gave two series of lectures, on modal logic and on nonstandard analysis. During this time he also gave a lecture in Pisa at a conference on "I Numeri Infinitesimi".

Yu Hayakawa has agreed to take on the role of Programme Director for Statistics and Operations Research for two years starting 1 December. Megan Clark has stepped down after many years of much-appreciated service.

Zoe Edward has been appointed by Continuing Education to teach the new Foundation Studies course in Mathematics and Statistics over the summer (Lyndon Smith will be teaching the Computer Studies course in that program). Zoe has Masters degrees in operations research from Sussex and Claremont Graduate School, plus considerable teaching experience, and will have an office in the School from October.

Estate Khmaladze (`Local point processes in the neighbourhood of sets'), Geoff Whittle (`Matroid Minors'), and Matt Visser (`How generic is Einstein's theory of general relativity?') have Marsden grants for 2003-5. This represents a remarkable level of success by many standards: it constitutes half the Marsden successes for VUW in this round, and $846,801 in external research income, that is, 37% of the total MIS panel grants for the round. Matt is also an Associate Investigator on a second Marsden funded through the Physics and Engineering panel, working with David Wilshire at Canterbury.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the appointment of Ian Welch to Lecturer in Computer Science and to Barry Blundell as Senior Lecturer in Computer Science. Barry is currently at Massey University at Albany and works in 3-d visual displays among other things. Ian is currently completing a PhD at Newcastle, UK in security protocols and will start in January.

Rod Downey has a Maclaurin fellowship for next year, and the CLLC Logic Colloquium funded by NZIMA will be directed by Rob Goldblatt.

Bill Naylor is employed to teach COMP 103 Data Structures and algorithms over the summer. Bill has his PhD from Bath and has been a PDF at Western Ontario, working on mathematical mark-up languages (MathML) and computer algebra systems (Maple, Aldor).

Mark McGuinness is spending some time at the Applied Mathematics Division, Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in Taejon in South Korea. Mark is part of a team, including Graeme Wake from Canterbury, John Donaldson from Tasmania, and Henning Rasmussen from Western Ontario, who are flying the flag for Industrial Applied Mathematics for a shared three-year period at KAIST. The position involves a little graduate teaching, and plenty of opportunity for research, in a university that has a strong engineering emphasis. The team was formed quite by chance, when all four of us were at the Oxford Centre for Industrial Applied Mathematics at the same time late last year.

Seminars

• Dr Carmen Molina-Paris (Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Leeds), "Mathematical model of T-cell activation".
• Dr Olivier Basdevant (Reserve Bank of New Zealand), "On applications of state-space modelling in macro-economics".
• Dr Granville Tunnicliffe-Wilson (Lancaster University), "Prediction theory and practice".
• David Boland, "The Future of Operational Research, in the Post Modern Workplace".
• Professor Timothy Budd (Oregon State University), "Multiparadigm Programming in J/MP".
• Professor Jim Geelen (Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, Ontario), "An algebraic matching algorithm".
• James Noble, "Patterns as Signs".
• Liyanage De Silva (National University of Singapore), "Detection, Tracking and Recognition of Human Faces in Smart Environments".
• Dr Victoria Mabin, "Goldratt's Critical Chain, The Alternative to Critical Path".
• Günter Last (Universitat Karlsruhe), "On curvature measures of general closed sets and their application in stochastic geometry".
• Maree Hunt, "Learning by association and control by consequences".
• Dr Paul S F Yip (The University of Hong Kong), "Estimating Population Size in Proportional Trapping-Removal Models".
• Kimmo Raatikainen (University of Helsinki), "Middleware for Mobile Computing".
• Tony Dale (University of Canterbury), "More Computer Disasters".
• Petr Hlineny, "Using Computers in Mathematical Research".
• Jeremy Ginsberg, "The Digital Michelangelo Project: 3D Scanning of Large Statues".
• Wu Guohua, "Interactions between the c.e. degrees and the d.c.e. degrees".
• Associate Professor Henry B Wolfe (Department of Information Science, University of Otago), "An Introduction to Computer Forensics: Gathering Evidence in a Computing Environment".
• Dr Vladan Devedzic, "What Does Current Web-based Education Lack?"
• Jose M Turull Torres, "Relational databases and homogeneity in logics with counting".
• Richard Dearden, "AI on Mars: Autonomy for Planetary Rovers".
• Associate Professor Serge Demidenko (Massey University, Palmerston North), "Essentials and challenges of electronic testing".

Mark McGuinness