Number 89     December 2003

NEWSLETTER

OF THE

NEW ZEALAND MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY (INC.)

Contents

PUBLISHER’S NOTICE
EDITORIAL
PRESIDENT’S COLUMN
LOCAL NEWS
FEATURES
CENTREFOLD Professor Michael McIntyre
NEW COLLEAGUES
OBITUARY David Spence
BOOK REVIEWS
CONFERENCES
NOTICES
Application for Membership of the NZMS

MATHEMATICAL MINIATURE 22 Dennis McEldowney; Snow through a spectrum darkly

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

MORE, PLEASE

This issue began with the idea of honouring our achievers young and old. Cynthia Wang and Sivajah Somasundaram publish versions of their Aitken prizewinning talks, while to honour the lifetime achievements of Garry Tee, who has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the Auckland University of Technology, we publish a partial bibliography (selected by Garry himself) and his note on his recent talk on "The liberal art of geometry." If there is a value in prizes and awards, then surely it is maximized thus by rewarding people at the beginning and (towards) the end of their careers. There is also the publicity value to the discipline, so it was good to see the NZMS represented at the recent Science Honours Dinner; with the success of this event I'm sure even more science organizations will be clamouring to take part next year.

However, towards the end of the year honours seemed to rain down on our members, so that in this issue you can read about the achievements of not just Wang, Somasundaram, and Tee, but also Rod Downey (FNZMS), Jeff Hunter (NZS&T Bronze Medal), myself (NZAS Research Medal), Charles Pearce (FNZMS), David Ryan (FRSNZ), Charles Semple (Hamilton Prize), Mike Steel (FRSNZ), and Guohua Wu (Hatherton Award). Pretty close to a clean sweep for maths!

Robert McLachlan
Massey University

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

I was having a leisurely coffee one Saturday morning while Kim and Max impressed radio listeners with their knowledge of etymology. I took notice when Kim referred to (I paraphrase) a silent genius who can do differential equations, but is unable to maintain normal social interactions. I pay the mortgage by 'doing differential equations', and I wondered (not for the first time) why it is OK for arts graduates to be ignorant of mathematics and science. I tried asking a B.A. if she knew the significance of 3.14159, and was told that she didn't need to. My suggestion that that was the equivalent of me not recognizing a line from Hamlet was met with scorn. I was able to make use of the radio jibe after Massey put out a press release about my work, and I was phoned by Newstalk Radio for more details. I told them that I was "solving sets of differential equations, and nonlinear ones at that", and enjoyed the respectful silence on the other end. My contribution to that station was eclipsed, however, by some intemperate remarks from Paul Holmes; another B.A. who I suspect has no need of p.

A.C. Aitken is reputed to have been able to recite the first 1000 digits of p! The Forder lecturer is required to fulfill a feat that seems just as grueling, and Professor Caroline Series of the University of Warwick has just given 16 seminars in four weeks as the Forder lecturer. I'm sure that the novelty must wear off as you get towards the end of an undertaking like this, but all accounts of Caroline's visit are highly complimentary. We are fortunate to have access to some of the UK's elite mathematicians as a result of the Forder bequest.

I would like to congratulate two new Fellows of the Society. They are Professor Rod Downey of Victoria University, my predecessor in this position, and Associate Professor Charles Pearce of The University of Adelaide. Charles may be less well known in New Zealand circles, but he is a 22nd generation kiwi who just happens to work in the West Island. Another Fellow who was recently recognized is Professor Jeff Hunter of Massey University, who received a Royal Society of New Zealand Bronze Medal "for his significant contribution over an extended period to the public understanding of the role and importance that the mathematical and information sciences play in all spheres of the community including business and industry". One of the pleasures of being President is participating in the celebration of our high achievers. By the time that you read this the Inaugural Royal Society of New Zealand Science Honours Dinner will have taken place in Auckland and I will have handed Cynthia Wang and Rod Gover their certificates for the Aitken Prize and NZMS Research Award respectively (see President's Column last issue).

On October 17 Garry Tee, life member of the Society, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Auckland University of Technology. I was present at an earlier function at the Auckland University mathematics department and conveyed congratulations to Garry from the NZMS. If anybody is unaware of Garry's contribution to New Zealand mathematics and the Society, I suggest they read the article by Graeme Wake and Les Woods in this issue. Garry was there at the founding of the NZMS in 1974, and was one of the first members. So, next year is the Society's 30th anniversary. Are we the sort of people that celebrate, or are we silent geniuses who can do differential equations but are unable to maintain normal social interactions? Any suggestions for fitting ways for the Society to mark its 30th birthday would be very welcome.

Mick Roberts
Massey University, Auckland

LOCAL NEWS

AGRESEARCH

Stathie Triadis has joined AgSystems, working with the mathematical modelling team at Ruakura under Tony Pleasants and Tanya Soboleva. His initial goal is to do a literature review on all mathematical models describing the relationship between nutrition and the post-partum anoestrous interval in high-yielding dairy cows in relation to bolic/reproductive hormones and energy partitioning, with a view to improving any existing models.

Stathie has recently graduated from the University of Waikato with an MSc in mathematics. He was born in Greece but has lived 22 of his 23 years in New Plymouth, where his family now lives. This is his first research-based job. He comes from a job teaching calculus to foreign students with the Foundation Studies department at Waikato, and also tutoring first year university mathematics.

Paul Shorten presented a talk entitled "A mathematical model of fatty acid synthesis and triglyceride assembly in mammary cells" at the Modelling Cellular Function Meeting in Auckland in July, 2003, a seminar entitled "A mathematical model of fatty acid synthesis and triglyceride assembly: the role of Stearoyl CoA Desaturase (SCD)" to Vialactia in October, 2003, a seminar entitled "Biological control of Botrytis—a modelling analysis" at AgResearch in November, 2003.

Paul Shorten and Ken Louie gave presentations of some of their work as part of the ANZ sponsored "Maths in Action Week" to High School students and their teachers from Tauranga in August, 2003.

Dave Saville is apparently branching out into the murky waters of psychology—see Saville, D.J. (2003). Basic statistics and the inconsistency of multiple comparison procedures, Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 57(3), 167–175.

Ken Louie

THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

Department of Computer Science

Dr Jing Sun has recently joined the Department of Computer Science as a Lecturer. He had recently completed his PhD at the National University of Singapore, in the area of integrated formal methods to support the development of complex software systems. His interests include software engineering, formal methods and specification languages, real-time modelling and requirements analysis and specification.

Professor Jim Goodman has delivered his Inaugural Lecture: "What does Moore's Law tell us about the future?".

Gill Dobbie has received a Marsden Grant for "A mathematical foundation for semistructured data", and Bakh Khoussainov & Andre Nies have received a Marsden Grant for "Computability, complexity, and randomness".

On September 23 the Computer Science and Software Engineering Facility, in the new Science Centre, was officially opened by the Chancellor and the Dean of the Faculty of Science. A new display of computing history has been installed there. The display consists of two main parts: a timeline of computing history which runs along the walkway connecting the Ground Floor of Building 303 to the extension, and a display of The University of Auckland's first computer, an IBM 1620, in the Floor 1 foyer.

The Bachelor of Engineering (Software Engineering) programme at The University of Auckland is co-taught by the Departments of Computer Science (Science Faculty) and of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Engineering Faculty). The first students of this 4-year professional Engineering programme will complete their course at the end of 2003. The BE(SE) programme focuses on equipping graduates with software process, software design and testing, software development technology and a range of communication and research skills. A new Masters of Engineering(Software Engineering) has been approved to start in 2004.

Seminars

Gisela Klette, "Simple points in 3D binary images", and "Accurately measuring the size of the pupil of the eye".
Professor Cristian Calude, "Passages of proof".
Dr Alan Ling (University of Vermont), "Resolvable maximum packings with quadruples".
Ming Li, "A distributed framework for graph algorithms".
Jing Sun, "Tools and verification techniques for integrated formal methods".
Dr Jan Reimann (Universität Heidelberg), "Normal numbers and selection rules".
Colin Png, "Smart client technology".
Professor Rod Downey (VUW), "Parameterized complexity for the skeptic".
Professor Tadao Takaoka, "Heaps and shortest paths".
Dr André Nies, "Randomness and lowness".
Omer Rana, "Grid computing: the next grand challenge for computer science".
Dr Michael Dinneen, "An introduction to bounded-degree broadcast networks".
Chi-Kou Shu, "Computing exact approximations of a Chaitin Omega Number".
Dr Kevin Novins, "SIGGRAPH2003: a few of my favourite things".
Dr David Stanhill, "Multi-layer stereo using dynamic programming".
Johnson Chen, "Authoring and visualizing stereo panoramic images with Independent objects".
Mark Chan, "A strategy for 3D face analysis and synthesis".
Qi Zang, "Accuracy improvement in camera calibration".
Chia-Yen Chen, "3D reconstruction using shape from photometric stereo and contours".
Professor Moshe Y. Vardi (Rice University), "On the unusual effectiveness of logic in computer science", and "Logic begat computer science: when giants roamed the Earth".
Dr Frank Stephan, "Learning a subclass of regular patterns in polynomial time".
Dr Hartwig Hetzheim (DLR), "Fusion of properties of different kinds for decision making in image processing".

Garry J. Tee

Department of Engineering Science

David Ryan has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in recognition of his work on Operations Research, notably in connection with aircrew rostering at Air New Zealand. Kevin Wood from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, is a Visiting Professor for one year. He will be working with David Ryan. Ian Collins and Andrew Mason are on leave, and Andrew Pullan is enjoying his James Cook Fellowship free of teaching. It appears that after Christmas the Department of Engineering Science will be moved up the road, from 20 Symonds Street to 70 Symonds Street, despite some of our misgivings about being detached from other departments of the School of Engineering. One advantage is that we will be reunited with the Bioengineering section of our department

Don Nield

Department of Mathematics

Dr Mike Meylan has arrived, as Lecturer in Applied Mathematics; and Dr Shixiao Wang has arrived, as Lecturer in Industrial Mathematics at the Tamaki Campus.

Marston Conder has been elected to the Council of the Academy of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Dr Richard Evans, born and bred in Auckland, received a BSc(Hons) in Pure & Applied Mathematics in 1994 and an MSc in mathematics under Gaven Martin in 1995, both at the University of Auckland. He moved to the USA and gained a PhD at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in April 2000, for his thesis "Deformation spaces of hyperbolic 3-manifolds: strong convergence and tameness", supervised by Professor Richard Canary. He then moved to Rice University for a 3-year post-doctoral position, and there he married a Russian mathematics graduate student, Tatiana Marinenko. Richard is currently completing a NZ Science and Technology post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Auckland. Richard's wife Dr Tatiana Evans was born and grew up in St Petersburg, where she graduated from Herzen Pedagogical State University (with honours) and then went to the USA to obtain her PhD. She got her PhD at Rice University in May 2003 for her thesis "High-distance Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds", under the supervision of Professor John Hempel. She works in low-dimensional topology, and her current research interests include Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds and the curve complex. At present she has a 1-year lecturing position in our Department. Dr Helmut Podhaisky, from University of Halle, is here for a year (with his family), as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the NZIMA Programme. He is working with John Butcher on general linear methods for ordinary differential equations. Andy Begg is now an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department.

Bill Barton succeeds Maxine Pfannkuch as Head of the Mathematics Education Unit, for a 2-year term.

Rod Gover has been awarded a Maclaurin Fellowship, which is the premier award of the NZIMA. This award will enable Rod to concentrate full-time on research next year. No doubt some of that time he will want to travel overseas to enhance his research connections. However he is able to use some of the associated expense allowance to bring in visitors such as his current visitor, and that will be of benefit to the whole Department. This is another example of ways in which this Department is benefiting from the presence of the NZIMA. And Rod has received the NZ Mathematics Society Research Award for 2003 "for his highly original contributions in conformal differential geometry, that have led to the solution of some outstanding and difficult problems".

Marsden Fund Research Grants have been awarded to:

John Butcher (PI) & Allison Heard (AI), "Efficient general linear algorithms for ordinary different equations";
Howard Ross (PI), Dr Dianne Brunton (School of Biological Sciences, PI), Professor Allen Rodrigo (School of Biological Sciences, PI), Geoff Nicholls (AI) & A-Professor Russell Gray (Psychology, AI)}, "Singing in the Trees: Genealogical models of culturally-inherited traits and the population memetics of bird song";
Jozef Siran (PI), Paul Bonnington (PI) & Marston Conder (PI) }, "Algebraic and structural graph theory"; and to
Mike Meylan (PI)}.

Bill Barton & Hannah Bartholomew have won a Ministry of Education Teaching and Learning Research grant ($180,000 over two years) for researching professional development of senior secondary mathematics teachers. This was one of 14 awards made nationally, from 180 applications. Auckland University's Research Committee has awarded research grants to David Gauld (External Collaboration Seed Fund), to Norm Levenberg (Staff Research Fund), to Vivien Kirk (Staff Research Fund) and to Arkadii Slinko (International Strategic Opportunities & Research Cooperation Fund). John Butcher's book on "Numerical Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations" (Volume 2) has now been published by J. Wiley & Sons. He was an Invited Speaker at the conference on "Advances and Challenges in Time-Integration of PDEs" (Brown University, August 18–20), at the "10th NUMDIFF Conference" (Halle, September 8–11); and at the "International Conference on Computational Methods in Science and Engineering 2003" (Kastoria, Greece, September 12–16). At that Kastoria conference John was a member of the Scientific Committee, and also he was presented with the ICCMSE Prize in Computational Mathematics.

Geoff Nicholls attended the "18th International Radiocarbon Conference" (Wellington, September 3–5), and the conference on "Point Processes in Reliability Models" (Wellington, September 6). He was an Invited Speaker at the conference on "Mathematics and Statistics of Complex systems: Monte Carlo" (Melbourne, November 10–14).

Arkadii Slinko has been appointed as an Independent Expert of the VI Framework Programme of the European Community for Research and Technological Development. He is a Member of the Scientific Committee of the V International Conference on Non-Associative Algebras and Their Applications (July 2003, Mexico), which he was not able to attend because of his teaching commitments—but he submitted a paper on "Non-associative bracket arrangements and multiset orderings" to the Proceedings. During his sabbatical leave he spoke on "Exploratory Data Analysis of Common Social Choice Functions" at the International Symposium on Control Sciences (Moscow, 16–20 June, 2003). He gave an Invited Lecture on "Mathematical Economics" (Central Institute for Mathematics and Economics of Russian Academy of Sciences, March 2003), a Colloquium lecture (University of Caen, April 2003), a Colloquium Lecture (Centre de Recherche en Economie Mathematique et Econometrie, Paris, April 2003), a seminar on "Discrete Mathematics and Social Sciences" (University of Paris 1, May 2003), and a seminar on "Decision Theory" (Institute of Control Sciences of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, June 2003).

The conference "Delta:03, Southern Hemisphere Symposium on Undergraduate Mathematics Teaching" was held at Queenstown on November 22–27. Mike Thomas gave an invited plenary panel address on "The Use of CAS Technology in the Learning of First-Year Mathematics", and Barbara Miller-Reilly was a member of a plenary panel. The Proceedings of Delta:03 have been edited by Mike Thomas & Greg Oates.

The inaugural Auckland-Waikato Applied Mathematics Day was held at Massey University—Albany on October 31. From our Department there were John Butcher, Allison Heard, Robert Chan, Vivien Kirk, Steve Taylor, Mike Meylan, Nicolette Moir, Nicoleen Cloete, Helmut Podhaisky, and David Simpson and Jane Lee (masters students). Talks were given by Nicoleen, Nicolette and John. Angela Tsai, Shirley Huang and Allison Heard also went to and gave talks at the Wellington-Manawatu Applied Mathematics day in September.

A conference on Nearrings and Nearfields was held at Hamburg, July 27 to August 3, organized by Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg and Universität Hamburg. Stuart Scott was one of the five Invited Speakers. Recent visitors include Professor Len Bos (University of Calgary), Dr Javier Cirre (UNED, Madrid), Professor George Havas (University of Queensland), Professor Finnur Larusson (University of Western Ontario), Professor Richard Lesh (Purdue University), Dr Kevin McLeod (University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee), Dr Abdul Mohamad (Sultan Qaboos University, Oman) and Dr Jan Saxl (University of Cambridge).

Seminars

Dr Arkadii Slinko, "Parametrized complexity of optimal lobbying".
Dr Carlo Laing (Massey University at Albany), "Pattern formation in neural systems".
Caroline Yoon (Purdue University), "A models and modelling perspective on mathematical creativity".
Dr Hannah Bartholomew, ",'A fiercely held modesty': the experiences of women studying mathematics".
Dr Paul Gartside (The University of Pittsburgh), "Get rich quick the Banach-Tarski way".
Professor Richard Lesh (Purdue University), "What mathematics preparation is needed by heavy users of mathematics?".
Professor Finnur Larusson (University of Western Ontario), "Complex geometry and abstract homotopy theory".
Dr David McIntyre, "Finite intervals in partial orders of topologies".
Dr Peter Grootenboer (Waikato University), "The affective development of preservice primary teachers in mathematics".
Dr Peter Wills (Department of Physics), "Self-organised criticality in genetic systems".
Dr Abdul Mohamad, (Sultan Qaboos University, Oman), "Spaces with diagonal properties".
Dr Javier Cirre (UNED, Madrid), "Symmetry types of cyclic covers of the sphere branched over three points".
Professor Caroline Series (University of Warwick), "Indra's Pearls" (Forder Lecture 2003), and "Why dynamics requires hyperbolic geometry".
Dr Jiling Cao, "Topological properties defined by stars".
Willy Alangui, "Modelling water flow in a rice paddy".
Dr Richard Evans, "Thurston's ending lamination conjecture for hyperbolic 3-manifolds".
A-Professor Bill Barton, "Loose Talk: Some thoughts and questions about how we talk mathematics".
Professor George Havas (University of Queensland), "On proofs in finitely-presented groups".
Dr Tatiana Evans, "High-distance Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds".
Dr Jamie Sneddon, "Obstructions to clustered planarity".
Professor Richard S. Laugesen (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), "Wavelet type spanning sets for L^p and Sobolev space".
Professor Tony Brown (Waikato University), "The language of mathematics teaching".
Professor David Gauld, "Some manifold problems I would like to be able to answer".
Dr Joel Schiff, "The world of cellular automata".
Dr Kevin McLeod (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), "An overview of the geometrisation conjecture for 3-manifolds".
Dr Paul Hafner, "The universe in the Higman-Sims graph".
Cathy P. Vistro-Yu, (Ateneo de Manila University), "Mathematical literacy of Filipino students".
Dr Sina Greenwood, "Brunnian braids".
Dr Ye Yoon Hong, "Integrating CAS calculators into mathematics learning: Identifying partnership issues".
Dr Wiremu Solomon, "Teaching Maths 101 via multi-videoconferencing to Kura Kaupapa mathematics teachers".
Dr Jan Saxl (University of Cambridge), "On distance-transitive graphs and multiplicity-free representations".
Dr Vadim Kuznetsov (University of Leeds), "Jack polynomials: integral equation, representation and factorisation".
Dr Melissa Rodd (University of Leeds), "Ways ahead: successful mathematics students at two universities".

Garry J. Tee

Department of Statistics

Congratulations to George Seber and Alastair Scott, who have been elected as Life Members of the NZAS. David Vere-Jones and Geoff Jowett are the only other Life Members now living.

Renate Meyer and Nelson Christensen (formerly in our Department of Physics) have developed techniques for analysing very large amounts of data. Their techniques have been applied to analyse the cosmic afterglow—the resulting information is orders of magnitude more than all previous information about cosmology. And the results are sensational—ordinary matter accounts for only four percent of the gravity in the observable universe!

Chris Wild has become the President of the International Association for Statistics Education, for two years.

Rachel Fewster has gained a Fast Start Marsden Award 2003, for her project on "Stochastic modelling of rat invasions among islands in the New Zealand archipelago".

At the Annual Conference of the New Zealand Ecological Society, at Auckland on 2003 November 18, Marti Anderson delivered a Keynote Address on "Multivariate models for monitoring and environmental impact assessment".

Arden Miller has returned from leave at Simon Fraser University, and Paul Murrell has returned from leave at the University of Toronto.

Brian McArdle spent two months in Pago Pago on a contract for the Coral Reef Advisory Group, to analyse the accumulated reef-monitoring data on fish and coral.

Bo Cai has completed his PhD, on "Adaptive Sampling Schemes and Bayesian Semiparametric Survival Analysis".

Seminars

Dr Tony Blakely (University of Otago), "Death and Statistics—Using data matching techniques to correct biases in New Zealand mortality data".
Dr Moshe Haviv (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), "Queues with relative priorities".
Professor John S. Gray (University of Oslo), "The estimation of species richness: a new method and its application to marine data from Norway and Hong Kong".

Applied Probability Seminars

Dr Arden Miller , "A geometric interpretation of the analysis of unreplicated factorial".
(University of Waikato), "Modelling the distribution of recovered glass".
Dr Nicholas T. Longford , (De Montfort University, Leicester), "Examples of multiple imputation".
Heidi Larsson (University of Aarhus, Denmark), "Perinatal factors, parental psychiatric history, socioeconomic status and autism in Denmark—a register-based case-control study".
Dr Greg Ewing (School of Biological Sciences), "Migration rates from DNA sequence data via reversible-jump MCMC".

Garry J. Tee

UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Alister Smith finished his PhD in May with a thesis on "Optimal Marine Farm Structures" which was supported under a FRST Top Achiever Scholarship. His work used the Lattice Boltzmann Methods for computation of solutions on the partial differential equations involved in the flow past mussel beds, incorporating nutrient update. This was supervised by Graeme Wake in conjunction with NIWA colleagues. After a brief period overseas, Alister has taken up a Postdoctoral fellowship at NIWA, working on further applications of these Lattice Boltzmann techniques. Alister graduates PhD in December.

Dr Chris Hann has been awarded a FRST Postdoctoral Fellowship to work in the Biomedical Engineering group within the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The work will involve blood flows and heart dynamics. Dr Geoff Chase is the leader of this project. Congratulations Chris.

Dr Britta Basse completed her UC Postdoctoral Fellowship after presenting papers on tumour cell dynamics at ICIAM 2003 (July) and the EU conference "Linking Biological and Mathematical Models of Cancer" in Magdeburg, Germany (September). Britta and family are remaining in Germany while husband Mike finishes his PhD.

Postdoc Stefan Grunewald (funded by the NZIMA) arrived from Uppsala to begin a 6-month contract working with Charles Semple and Mike Steel. A further postdoc (Magnus Bordewich) will arrive in March from Oxford University to begin a postdoc, working primarily with Charles Semple.

Charles Semple has been awarded this year's Hamilton Memorial Prize (Royal Society of New Zealand) and Mike Steel has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

We had a very pleasant visit by Associate Professor Peter Fenton (University of Otago), who gave a very interesting talk about A.C. Aitken and renewed contacts with several members of the Department.

We are also enjoying an extended visit by Professor Richard Laugesen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), who is here courtesy of a Maclaurin Fellowship from the NZIMA. Rick is working on separate research projects with Qui Bui and Neil Watson. He is a native Kiwi, and a Canterbury graduate from the late 80's.

Peter Jarvis, a theoretical physicist from Tasmania spent two weeks working with Mike Steel, and talked about his recent work that applies techniques from quantum theory to phylogenetics.

A Southern Industrial Applied Mathematics (SIAM) day is scheduled at the Canesis Network premises at Lincoln, to facilitate industrial contact with applied mathematicians, in early December. These regional meetings are precursors to possible projects to be presented at a future MISG. This meeting is convened by Graeme Wake in conjunction with Canesis colleagues, and is supported by other South Island Universities.

Seminars

Dr Sung Woo Choi (Korea Institute for Advanced Study), "Medial axis transform and Minkowski sum".
Dr Arno Berger (Vienna University of Technology), "Dynamics and digits—The surprising ubiquity of Benford's law".
Dr Alex James (Sheffield Hallam University), "Modelling growth and foraging in fisheries recruitment".
Professor Gaven Martin (University of Auckland), "The PDE's of nonlinear elasticity, conformal geometry and the Hilbert-Smith Conjecture".
Dr Burkard Polster (Monash University), "What is the best way to lace your shoes?"
Professor Caroline Series (Warwick University), "The Geometry of Markov Numbers" and "Indra's Pearls".
Professor Peter Jarvis (University of Tasmania), "Structure and informatics of the genetic code".
Associate Professor Peter Fenton (University of Otago), "A. C. Aitken".
Dr Wim Hordijk , "Detecting autocatalytic, self-sustaining sets in chemical reaction systems".
Associate Professor Emeritus David A. Smith (Duke University), "Reusable Tools for Creating Interactive Online Learning Environments".

INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH LIMITED

Applied Mathematics Team

Now that FRST bid writing is behind us for 2003, our day-to-day lives have returned to normal, with most of us trying to catch up with work on existing FRST contracts. The final outcomes of this bidding round won't be known until early April next year, although there will be a short-listing of proposals in December.

We hosted the Manawatu-Wellington Applied Maths Meeting this year. There was a good turn out again and an impressive variety of talks on offer. After the meeting, many of participants enjoyed a pleasant evening at the Sungai-Wan, a Malaysian Restaurant in Lower Hutt.

In October Shaun Hendy attended the Electrochemical Society meeting in Florida and gave a talk in the surface oxide films minisymposium entitled "Atomistic modeling of the passive film on iron".

Graham Weir attended the AIChE meeting in San Francisco in November and gave a talk on the "Coefficient of Restitution". Graham also have his Inaugural Lecture as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in Auckland earlier in November.

Steve White and Warwick Kissling both attended the New Zealand Geothermal Workshop in Auckland in November. Steve talked about CO₂ sequestration and Warwick talked about the "Transport of hypersaline brines".

Shaun Hendy

LINCOLN UNIVERSITY

Applied Computing, Mathematics and Statistics Group

A research monograph "Stochastic Dynamics" on stochastic differential equations and their application in modelling fluid transport in a porous medium, was published earlier this year by Lincoln University authors Don Kulasiri and Wynand Verwoerd as Volume 44 in the North-Holland Series in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics.

Don Kulasiri has a background in theoretical engineering. He is currently professor of computational modelling and simulation, and teaches undergraduate courses in calculus and discrete event simulation, and postgraduate courses on advanced simulation and modelling of environmental systems. His research interests are in modelling and simulation of environmental and biological processes and systems, and engineering systems containing cellular materials.

Wynand Verwoerd is a senior lecturer in computing and quantitative methods, having broadened his interests from an earlier academic career in theoretical physics, to encompass applied mathematics and computation in biological and other sciences. He teaches undergraduate courses in linear algebra, differential equations and Monte Carlo risk analysis, and postgraduate courses in optimisation and mathematical modelling. His current research projects include stochastic transport in porous media, hydrodynamic potential modelling of flow in a non-homogenous porous medium, and population dynamics models of pest control.

Both authors are also founder members of C-fACS, the Centre for Advanced Computational Solutions at Lincoln University, that among others currently undertakes contract research on network fault diagnosis for Transpower, dairy farm modelling for Dexcel, and modelling of river flood events.

Wynand Verwoerd

MASSEY UNIVERSITY

Institute of Fundamental Sciences (Palmerston North) Mathematics

Michael Carter retires in December 2003. Mike is one of the 'Old Brigade' at Massey University, having come to here in 1971 from the University of Witwatersrand to take up a Lectureship in the Department of Mathematics. During his 33 years of service Mike has made an indelible impression on the mathematical scene. His enthusiasm, deep knowledge of his subject and expository skills has placed Mike in the highest rank of teachers of mathematics. His research, particularly in the history of mathematics and mathematics education, is noted for its quality of scholarship. Massey University and the wider community owe much to Mike for his initiatives and guiding hand in distance education generally and mathematics in particular. His administrative skills, logical approach and attention to detail are widely appreciated, particularly so by the Institute of Fundamental Sciences, Mathematics group which he has led for the last two years. Mike's superb knowledge of programmes and curricula, his first rate attention to student and staff needs and his fairness in dealing with issues has gained him the highest respect. His leadership was also recognised in his being elected the tenth President of the New Zealand Mathematical Society, 1984–85, a role that he exercised with diplomacy and insight. We will miss Mike's calm and efficiency in keeping us in order! We wish him and Norma all the best in retirement.

Robert McLachlan gave his inaugural professorial lecture, "The stars in their courses: 300 years of geometric integration" on 26 September. Copies of the lecture are available from the Institute. Ari Iserles sent his apologies from Cambridge, saying he would have liked to be there if only to see Robert in a suit. Sadly he would have been disappointed. (Doesn't John Butcher have a story about a mathematician who doesn't even own a shirt?)

Our congratulations to Robert who on 15 October won the New Zealand Association of Scientists Research Medal. Since one of the criteria is being under 40, this was almost (but not quite, he insists) his last opportunity. Previous mathematicians to have won this medal include Bruce Calvert in 1979, Rob Goldblatt in 1985, and Rod Downey in 1994. The medal was awarded at the Science Honours Dinner in Auckland on 13 November (see photo later in the Newsletter).

Also congratulations to Bruce van-Brunt who has been promoted to Associate Professor.

Finally our congratulations to Padmanathan Kathirgamathan who successfully defended his PhD thesis: "Source parameter estimation of atmospheric pollution from accidental releases of gas".

Bruce van-Brunt, Marijcke Vlieg-Hulstman, Patrick Rynhart, Igor Boglaev, Robert McLachlan, James Matheson and Tammy Smith braved a cold day with howling antarctic winds and persistent horizontal rain to attend the 6th Wellington-Manawatu Applied Mathematics Conference held at the Alan MacDiarmid Conference Centre, Industrial Research Limited, Gracefield, Lower Hutt.

Patrick spoke about "Mathematical modelling of wet granulation", Igor about: "On a block monotone domain decomposition algorithm for a nonlinear reaction-diffusion problem", Robert about: "Multisymplectic box schemes and the Korteweg-de Vries equation" and James about: "Modelling RNA replication". It was a pleasant day with interesting talks and it was great the to catch up on gossip with the other participants.

As those good events have so far taken place about 500 km south of the Bombay Hill, Waikato and Auckland decided to follow into Wellington-Manawatu's footsteps and held their first Auckland/Waikato Applied Maths day at the Albany campus of Massey University. Igor dared to head north of the Bombay Hill to inspect this Applied Maths day and spoke about "Monotone domain decomposition algorithms for a nonlinear convection-diffusion problem".

Barbara Holland writes: "Last month I managed to escape Massey for five weeks and visit Europe. I'm in the very fortunate position that my NZST postdoc comes with money that's intended to be spent on travel to conferences—if I don't spend it I just have to give it back. Vincent Moulton and I had submitted a paper to WABI 2003 (Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics) which was accepted, so we decided I should present it and then travel up to work with him and Kathi Huber in Uppsala for a few weeks. "Uppsala is an old university town, the oldest in Scandinavia (they heard that the Danes were planning to build a University and decided that they'd better get one first). I managed to inveigle my way onto a tour of the university buildings. The most interesting place we visited was the old anatomy theatre. Under Swedish law the only people that could be used as medical cadavers were suicides and executed criminals. Suicides were no good as they could not be predicted and so it was impossible to sell tickets in advance. Apparently Olaf Rudbeck, the professor in charge, used to petition the local judges to stay executions until after the spring thaw so that he could sell more tickets to the dissections. "The same building contained a museum with all sorts of interesting things including a thermometer by Celsius. When he first built a thermometer he had 0 degrees as being boiling and 100 degrees as ice, according to the guide it is one of sciences minor mysteries as to when and why this got swapped around (anyone have any ideas on this?). "The museum also contained lots of information on Linnaeus who sounded like a dangerous sort of supervisor. He had a habit of identifying promising students and sending these students over the world on collecting trips. Only five out of 14 made it back to Sweden! Murder, madness, suicide and disease claimed the rest. One student (Daniel Solander) travelled with Captain Cook and Joseph Banks on their journey to New Zealand. "Another highlight in Uppsala was the discovery that an old "host sister" of mine, Karin was doing her PhD at the Angstrom Institute in Uppsala just across the road from where I was working—small world eh? Karin used to be a Swedish exchange student to Te Kuiti High School who stayed with my family for a year. "From Uppsala I travelled down to Tübingen in Southern Germany. It's a ridiculously picturesque little town. The Altstadt is pretty much intact, with lots of winding cobbled streets and building towering up at odd angles. I helped teach a two day block course on phylogenetic methods along with Daniel Huson, Vince Moulton and Kay Nieselt-Struwe (all of whom have had postdocs in NZ at one time or another). I was pleased to see that Daniel's PhD student Tobias (who visited the AWC last year) was almost recovered from his climbing accident—in fact he could get up the stairs on crutches faster than I could without them. "Finally I headed up to Bielefeld where I caught up with Paul and Erna Gardner. Paul has settled in well with Robert Giegirich's group still working on problems to do with RNA structure. They will be staying in Germany until February and then heading up to Copenhagen for another post-doctoral position (funded by the Carlsberg Foundation) at Copenhagen University with the Evolutionary Biology group."

Seminars

Professor Robert McLachlan , "The entropy of classical mechanics".
Dr Graham Weir (Industrial Research Limited), "Newton's coefficient of restitution".
Dr Aroon Parshotam (Landcare Research (NZ) Ltd), "Systems thinking and reductionism".
Dr Tammy Smith , "Massey mathematics on WebCT".
Dr Anthony Cole (Landcare Research (NZ) Ltd), "Modelling complex ecological-economic systems—a mathematical perspective".
Dr Anthony Blaom (The University of Auckland), "Reconstruction phases in Hamiltonian systems with symmetry".
Professor Caroline Series (The University of Warwick), Forder Lecturer, "Why is there hyperbolic geometry in dynamics?", "The geometry of Markov numbers" and "Indra's pearls".
Dr Carlo Laing (Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, Massey University, Albany), "Pattern formation in neural systems".
Dr Winston Sweatman (Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, Massey University, Albany), "Million-body and fewer-body problems".

Graduate Seminar Series

Amsha Nahid (Institute of Technology and Engineering), "Prediction of heat transfer in bulk milk-fat products".
James Matheson , "Modelling RNA replication".
Padma Senerath , "Finsler geometry".
Brett Ryland , "Random bead-packs in cylinders".
Bård Skaflestad , "Splitting methods for initial value problems".

Marijcke Vlieg-Hulstman

Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences (Albany)

Jeff Hunter has been awarded a 2003 New Zealand Science and Technology Bronze Medal "For exemplary contributions over an extended period to the public understanding of the role and importance that the Mathematical and Information Sciences play in all spheres of the community including business and industry".

Carlo Laing has been awarded a Fast Start grant from the Marsden Fund to work on the project "Pattern formation in higher order differential equations". The award is for $100,000 over the period 2004–2005. Carlo will use the funds to continue his research on partial integro-differential equations that arise in the modelling of pattern formation in the cortex.

Jeff's travels took him to Europe in late July where he experienced their heat wave in contrast to the cool winter weather here. Coupled with a visit to University College London, he presented a paper on "Perturbations of Markov Chains" at the 12th Workshop on Matrices and Statistics at the University of Dortmund, Germany over the period 4 to 8 August. Jeff's bid to hold the 14th Workshop in this series has been accepted, with IIMS hosting the conference 30 March to 1 April, 2005. It is intended that the Workshop will be promoted as a satellite conference to the International Statistical Institute Conference in Sydney, which is to be held the week after.Jeff will chair a Local Organizing Committee while continuing to liaise with the International Committee.

Jeff also visited the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Singapore Polytechnic in August and in September he attended the Workshop on Point Processes in Reliability Models, Victoria University of Wellington, and presented a paper on "Mixing Times with applications to Perturbed Markov chains".

In August, Howard Edwards also found the late northern summer when he attended the Joint Statistical Meetings (ASA/IMS/Biometrics) in San Francisco and an International Workshop on Bayesian Data Analysis in Santa Cruz. At the latter meeting he presented a paper on a hierarchical Bayesian approach to modelling the relationship between unemployment and crime in New Zealand.

On 2 September, an evening was held on campus in Albany for local school teachers. In an interesting session for all presentations were given by Carlo Laing, Paul Bracewell, Mick Roberts and Paul Cowpertwait on their varied Mathematics and Statistics research topics.

Graeme Wake and Robert McKibbin attended the 6th Annual Wellington-Manawatu Applied Mathematics Conference held at Industrial Research Limited, Gracefield, Lower Hutt, on 5 September. Graeme gave a talk on "Solution of the Cauchy problem for the convection-diffusion equation". Graeme has meanwhile been busy planning with the MISG 2004 "Mathematics-in-Industry Study Group" meetings to be held at the University of Auckland, 26 to 30 January of next year. Details of the MISG 2004, including registration, are available at http://misg2004.massey. ac.nz,.

On September 25, Paul Bracewell attended the SAS Users Conference and presented a paper on "Rugby brains that don't forget". His paper appears in the SUNZ Conference Proceedings, pp. 13–14, SAS Institute, Wellington. On 24th October, Paul appeared on TV One Breakfast to explain how to use statistics to evaluate the performance of All Black rugby players.

On 2nd October, Mick Roberts attended MicroNZ 2003, the combined annual meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Societies for Microbiology at the Aotea Centre, Auckland, and presented an invited paper on "A measles epidemic controlled by a mathematical model".

Also in October, Denny Meyer attended the 12th meeting of the NZ Econometrics Group in Wellington. The Vice-Chancellor has approved the establishment of a Centre for Data Mining within IIMS directed by Denny.

The postgraduate students have been busy this session. Well done to Jo Mann, who has obtained an NZIMA Postgraduate Scholarship in Industrial Mathematics. Congratulations to Paul Bracewell on the completion of his PhD "Quantification of Individual Rugby Player Ability through Multivariate Analysis and Data Mining", and to Bernard Ee who has completed his MSc "An analysis of two-layered flows in pipelines".

The annual "Beyond Graduation" session was held on 11 September when approximately 20 IIMS postgraduate students presented posters on their research. The postgraduate students had put an enormous amount of effort into preparation of their posters, and they looked fantastic. Frederick Lam and Joanne Mann were presented with excellence awards for their posters. The posters were followed on 21 and 23 October by a series of seminars given by the postgraduates.

The First Auckland/Waikato Region Applied Maths Day was held at the Albany campus of Massey University on 31 October and was coordinated by Carlo Laing. About 30 staff and students from Massey University (both Albany and Palmerston North), Auckland University, Waikato University, and IRL attended. There was a programme of 12 short talks (in order of presentation):

Nicoleen Cloete (Department of Mathematics, The University of Auckland), "MCMC for a distribution over ancestral selection graphs".
Robert McKibbin (IIMS, Massey University, Albany), "Particulate transport through a layered atmosphere".
Shaun Cooper (IIMS, Massey University, Albany), "Classical and cubic theta functions".
John Butcher (Department of Mathematics, The University of Auckland), "High order A-stable numerical methods for stiff problems".
Graeme Wake (IIMS, Massey University, Albany), "Activities for the Mathematics-in-Industry Study Group 2004".
Cynthia Wang (IIMS, Massey University, Albany), "Modelling a plate of arbitrary shape in an infinitely deep water using a higher order method".
Nicolette Moir (Department of Mathematics, The University of Auckland), "A new class of methods for solving ordinary differential equations".
Igor Boglaev (Institute of Fundamental Sciences, Massey University, Palmerston North), "Monotone domain decomposition algorithms for a nonlinear convection-diffusion problem".
Don Nield (Department of Engineering Science, The University of Auckland), "Advances in convection in porous media".
Mick Roberts (IIMS, Massey University, Albany), "SARS—what could have happened?"
Zhenquan Li (Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Auckland), "Numerical solutions for mathematical models in fluid engineering".
Winston Sweatman (IIMS, Massey University, Albany), "Symmetrical collinear four-body problems".

The Applied Maths Day concluded with a barbecue at Shaun Cooper's house. The quality of talks was high and the day was very successful. We hope that this was the first in a series of annual meetings to be held in the northern region.

Congratulations are due to Vanessa and Merrill Bowers on the birth of son and grandson Sebastian and to Graeme Wake on the birth of grandson Clayton.

We said farewell to Mike Meylan who has gone to The University of Auckland, and to Kathy Ruggiero who has gone to CSIRO in Canberra. Applications to fill their positions have been received, and are being processed.

Also, a subcontract from AgResearch enabled a vacancy for a post-doctoral fellow to work with Mick Roberts to be advertised. We should be able to announce some new appointments in the next NZMS newsletter.

At the time of writing (early November) several of the mathematicians are looking the worse for wear. Well done to Mick Roberts and Shaun Cooper who completed the Auckland Marathon and Winston Sweatman who completed the Half Marathon.

Visitors

The 2003 Forder Lecturer, Caroline Series, from the University of Warwick, visited Albany on 24 and 25 September. She gave two talks, "Indra's Pearls" and "The Geometry of Markov Numbers". Jeff Hunter recalled attending Professor Forder's lectures 40 years ago!

Moshe Haviv, from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, visited Jeff Hunter on Thursday 25 September.

Seminars

Scott Whineray , "Two energy options: the solar house and the fuel cell car".
Denny Meyer , "Cointegration for count data".
Mick Roberts , "Modelling strategies for minimising the impact of an imported infection—SARS and smallpox".
Graeme Wake , "Modelling cell population growth with applications to cancer therapy".
Alona Ben-Tal (Bioengineering, The University of Auckland), "Modelling interactions between the heart and the lung".
Jeff Hunter , "Modelling correlated arrival processes and their impact on standard queueing models".
Nick Longford (De Montfort University, Leicester, UK), "Stability of household income in European countries in the 1990's".
Howard Edwards , "Bayesian statistics".
Nihal Kuluratna (Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Auckland), "Moore's law, system on a chip (SOC) concepts and the importance of power supply interface and protection".
Paul Bracewell , "Rugby match prediction using Data Mining Techniques".
Jamie Sneddon (Mathematics Department, The University of Auckland), "Obstructions to clustered planarity".
Richard S Laugesen (Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois, USA), "Characterizing wavelets".
Peter Hughes (Auckland College of Education), "The New Zealand Numeracy Project".

Winston Sweatman

UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Vernon Squire, our current Head of Department, has been awarded his third Marsden Grant, on which he is co-principal investigator with Michael Meylan who is now at The University of Auckland. Vernon has been heavily involved with the PBRF MIST panel, which he chairs, over the last few months. This has involved a considerable amount of work for many people but the preliminary results are now in at the time of writing, and the final scores will be decided in the near future. Vernon is actually departing the fold; he has been appointed to replace Dr Ron Heath as the new Assistant Vice-Chancellor of the Division of Sciences from February 2004. Unable to give a good reason why, he believes it is something to do with a mid-life crisis.

We are celebrating the award of a Fast-Start Marsden grant to Boris Baeumer to work on "Contaminant transport in fractal media". That should keep him busy for a while ... Richard Barker attended the EURING 2003 conference: Development, understanding and integration of new methodologies in the analysis of ringing data conference in Germany from 1–11 October and presented a plenary paper. EURING is the premier conference on mark-recapture methods in ecology and will be held in Dunedin in early 2007. He also visited the CEFE-CNRS in France from 22 September to 4 October on study leave to collaborate with Dr Jean-Dominique Lebreton, a leading ecological statistician who attended the SEEM4 conference in Dunedin as an invited speaker.

Dr Phil Battley has been appointed as a Postdoctoral Fellow for three years to work with Richard on a FoRST grant project entitled Linking hemispheres: comparative demographics and movements of migratory shorebirds. Phil's project involves looking at the energetic costs for bar-tailed godwits and red knots as they migrate from their Arctic breeding grounds to New Zealand. Some birds are believed to fly from 5000–8000 km in single flights during this migration.

John Clark was an invited speaker at the 4th China-Japan-Korea International Symposium on Ring Theory which was to be held in Nanjing, China from 24–28 June. Unfortunately this was cancelled due to SARS but has been rescheduled for 2004. John did attend the International Conference on Algebras, Modules and Rings held in Lisbon, Portugal from 14–18 July and preceded that with a week working with a fellow ring theorist at the University of Porto in Northern Portugal.

During 2003, Coralie Daniel's "maths-and-research-inspired art" led to her being invited to organise a section on "Stimulating Creative Thinking by Non-standard Methods" for the Third International Conference on Creativity in Mathematics Education and the Education of Gifted Students, held in Rousse, Bulgaria, in August, to be a keynote speaker at the Learning through the Arts Conference held in Wellington in July, and to exhibit her work at the Forrester Gallery, Oamaru, for two months in August/September.

John Enlow resigned his fixed term position as a Lecturer in Mathematics and Computational Modelling in October to take up a position outside of academia with ADInstruments. John has been around the Department for quite a long time, firstly as an Honours student, then as a teaching Assistant and finally as a Lecturer. We wish him well in his career as a scientific programmer.

David Fletcher attended the EURING 2003 Conference on mark-recapture methods in Radolfzell, Germany from 6–11 October. From there he travelled to CEFE-CNRS in Montpellier, France, to visit Jean-Dominique Lebreton. He spent two weeks study leave there, and also enjoyed the well-known gastronomic delights of that part of the world. David also attended the New Zealand Ecological Society meeting in Auckland in late November, where he gave an invited talk on the use of population modelling in conservation.

John Harraway was invited to speak in the Topic "Statistical Training for Consultants and Collaborators" at the 54th Session of the International Statistical Institute in Berlin in August. He also attended the IASE Satellite Conference on Statistics Education and the Internet and spent a week in Hamburg on study leave visiting Dr Stefan Brager who he has collaborated with on dolphin habitat selection problems.

Seminars

Associate Professor Peter Fenton , "Archimedes's Method".
April Patrick (Otago Boys' High School), "Statistics: From Otago University to the class room".
Richard R Laugesen (Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), "Convex curves and surfaces with minimal moment of inertia".
Chris Woodward (Rutgers University), "Eigenvalues of sums of Hermitian matrices and puzzles".
Professor Caroline Series (Warwick University, 2003 Forder Lecturer), "Indra's Pearls" and "Kleinian groups and their parameter spaces".
Ken Houston (University of Ulster), "Embedding 'key skills' in undergraduate mathematical sciences programmes".

Lenette Grant

THE UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO

Department of Mathematics

We welcome our new post-doc, Gabriel Fruit, to the department. He has recently completed his PhD in (analytic) magnetospheric work at CESR Toulouse. He will be working with Ian Craig, Alfred Sneyd, and Sean Oughton on their Marsden Fund project which is investigating turbulence and magnetic reconnection in the solar atmosphere.

We congratulate Kevin Broughan on being awarded a Claude McCarthy Fellowship. This will enable him to go to the USA next year to continue his work on analytic number theory and software development.

In late November a retirement function was held for Graham French. Devoted readers of this column will recall the same sentence in the December 1997 issue of this Newsletter. So this event marked Graham's second retirement. He has served the Department and the University for about 35 years. We wish Graham well in his second retirement.

Jacob Heerikhuisen and Sivajah Somasundaram have recently left. Jacob has been a contract lecturer this year while Sivajah has recently submitted her PhD thesis. They have gone to sunny California, where Jacob is taking up a post-doc position at the University of California, Riverside.

The 2003 Forder Lecturer, Professor Caroline Series, visited us at the end of September. Both her public lecture and colloquium seminar were well-attended and well-received. We were delighted with the fractal pictures she showed during her talks.

Tim Stokes had Marcel Jackson from La Trobe University as a visitor for two weeks in November. They continued their research work on semi-groups.

Rua Murray is involved with the NZIMA thematic programme on Dynamical Systems and Numerical Analysis. This programme will take place in the second half of 2004.

One traveller in the department was Ernie Kalnins who spent most of August and part of September in Armenia. While there, he presented a talk at the X International Conference on Symmetry Methods in Physics held in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He also attended the XI European School of High-Energy Physics. This was held in Tsakhkadzor which is about 40 km north of Yerevan.

Another traveller was Sean who spent a week at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland, where he was an invited attendee at a workgroup on "Plasma turbulence and the propagation of charged particles in the heliosphere". Although most attendees at ISSI are physicists, the institute nonetheless seems to take seriously Paul Erdos's dictum that a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems, with top quality coffee available on-tap throughout the week.

Seminars

M. Jackson (La Trobe University), "The Kuratowski closure-complement problem".
D. Leonova , "Game theory: Repeated games of complete information".
K. Spragg , "The shallow water equations: The method of characteristics and two numerical approximation schemes".
A.R. Barnett , "High-precision values of the real Gamma function".
C. Series (University of Warwick, Forder Lecturer 2003), "Why is there hyperbolic geometry in dynamics?".
C. Series (University of Warwick, Forder Lecturer 2003), "Indra's pearls".
S. Somasundaram , "Recent results on weak Asplund spaces".
I. Hawthorn , "The Banach-Tarski paradox".
S. Parkins (The University of Auckland), "Quantum chaos with ultra-cold atoms".
M. Meylan (The University of Auckland), "Application of spectral theory to linear water waves".
M. Black (Auckland University of Technology), "The Applied Mathematics Department at AUT".
S. Joe , "Construction of good quasi-Monte Carlo rules for functions in weighted spaces".

Stephen Joe

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF\\ WELLINGTON

School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences

We are all delighted that Guohua Wu is being awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand's 2003 Hatherton Award, for the best scientific paper by a student registered for the degree of PhD in NZ. The nominated paper Isolation and Lattice Embeddings is published in the world's top logic journal, the prestigious Journal of Symbolic Logic. This paper introduces a new notion called an isolation pair. This is used to give completely novel insight into lattice embeddings which are basic operations in the arena. The novel aspect is to separate the "cupping" and "capping" aspects of such an embedding. It allows for a new proof of Downey's Diamond Theorem. The technique also has been used recently by Downey, Li, and Wu to prove the remarkable result that a computably enumerable degree is capable if and only if it is complemented in the d.c.e degrees. This last paper is accepted for publication in the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. Wu's technique seems to have a number of very important applications and hence has weight well beyond the (very fine) result itself.

We very much enjoyed the visit of Forder lecturer Caroline Series, who gave a public lecture on Indra's Pearls, as well as two more technical math seminars.

James Noble has accepted a Chair in computer science at VUW. He has been on the staff of SMCS since 1999, having completed a PhD here in 1996 and having positions at the University of Technology in Sydney and the Microsoft Research Institute at Macquarie in the 90s. James's research is in software engineering and specifically in aliasing in OO systems, design patterns and software design visualisation. He has had a very successful and ongoing collaboration with Robert Biddle with whom he has an active research group including more than 20 graduate students. He has also collaborated with other staff and students in SMCS and in SIM, SLALS, and Music. James is currently completing a Marsden Fast Start grant on aliasing and ownership and has a new 3-year grant starting in 2004. He is also involved in a PGSF project on Domain Specific Software Tools with colleagues in Auckland and a TBG grant with Robert and Information Power Ltd.

Lindsay Groves has accepted a position as Associate Professor in computer science. Lindsay has been at Victoria since 1985 and has an extensive publication record in formal methods of computer science, with emphasis on refinement calculus and its practical application to improving software, and more recently in concurrency. As well as being involved in a large FRST funded project in collaboration with colleagues at Waikato and a Marsden Fund project to start in 2004 with Gill Dobbie (Auckland), Lindsay (together with Ray Nickson) has received major funding from Sun Microsystems for a project on proof methodologies in concurrent algorithms.

Stuart Marshall has been appointed to a permanent position as Lecturer in computer science. Stuart has made a significant contribution already to teaching in software engineering, having taught in both COMP 301 and 389 during the last two years. He has already established an excellent reputation as a teacher, and he has had six papers published in conference proceedings and has a further four accepted for publication in 2004.

Promotions this year: congratulations to Richard Arnold, Colin Bailey, Ivy Liu and Ray Nickson all promoted to Senior Lecturer; Marcus Frean and Dong Wang promoted over bars in the Senior Lecturer scale; and Robert Biddle, Mark McGuinness and Megan Clark promoted within the Associate Professor/Reader scale. Shirley Pledger received an accelerated promotion on the SL scale which took her over a bar. The Promotions Committee particularly acknowledged the international recognition given to Shirley's work on heterogeneous capture-recapture models.

Yu Hayakawa has stepped down as programme director for the STOR group after nearly a year in the role.

Megan Clarke has agreed to take back on the role after a short escape from it, starting this week. Megan will hold the position till June 2004 soon after which she will be on research and study leave. Also, congratulations to Megan on her recent election to membership of the International Statistics Institute.

Congratulations to Marcus Frean for being voted a Victoria (Post-Grad Students Assoc. award) for Most Challenging and Stimulating Course in Science: COMP 421 Machine Learning.

Successful Marsden applications for 2004 were:

James Noble and Robert Biddle: Ownership types for Object-oriented and Aspect-oriented programming,
Yinhuo Zhang and Rob Goldblatt: Non-commutative geometry, Brauer group theory and geometric logic,
Lindsay Groves: A mathematical foundation for semistructured data (with Gill Dobbie at Auckland),
Marcus Frean (AI): Spatial scale and the paradox of the resource concentration hypothesis (PI Stephen Hartley, SBS).

Seminars

Yasuko Chikuse, "Statistical analysis on special manifolds".
Robin Crockett (University College Northampton, UK), "Patterns in numbers".
Stefanka Chukova and Yu Hayakawa , "Warranty analysis: An overview and some new probabilistic models".
Phillip Morrow (U. Ulster), "An image processing approach to determining fluid velocity fields for complex 2D media".
Saul Gass (University of Maryland), "The analytic hierarchy process".
Saul Gass (University of Maryland), "The first linear programming shoppe".
Tim Wright , "A task and multiple-language analysis of programming environments".
Stuart Marshall , "Understanding reusable components".
Lindsay Groves "Verifying non-blocking concurrent algorithms".
Pranay Chaudhuri] (U. West Indies), "A self-stabilizing graph algorithm: bridge-connected components detection".
Klaus-Dieter Schewe (Massey), "Functional dependencies in higher-order datamodels and XML".
Tom Downs (School of ITEE, University of Queensland), "Improving the performance of support vector methods".
Nicholas Longford (De Montfort University, Leicester), "Examples of multiple imputation in large-scale surveys".
Nicolai Shilov (Russian Academy of Science), "Axiomatizing propositional linear temporal logic at home of A. Prior".
Rod Lea "Dissecting the genetics of complex disease".
Richard Laugesen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), "Wavelet-type sampling formulas: how to discretize a mollification".
Tony McGregor (Waikato), "Computer network measurement research at Waikato".
Caroline Series (Forder Lecturer, University of Warwick, UK), "Indra's Pearls", "Geometry of Markov numbers" and "Kleinian groups and their parameter spaces".
Alan Blackwell (Cambridge), "Symbolic representations for home and school: Professor Rigour vs Doctor Accessibility".

Mark McGuinness

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