Number 87     April 2003

NEWSLETTER

OF THE

NEW ZEALAND MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY (INC.)

Contents

PUBLISHER’S NOTICE
EDITORIAL
PRESIDENT’S COLUMN
PRESIDENT’S REPORT 2001-2002
LOCAL NEWS
OBITUARY Bernhard Neumann
FEATURES
CENTREFOLD Bruce Weir
NEW COLLEAGUES
BOOK REVIEWS
CONFERENCES
MINUTES
NOTICES
Application for Membership of the NZMS

MATHEMATICAL MINIATURE 20 Mathematics and Music

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

Mathematical Biographies
Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?

Not many mathematicians lead interesting lives. Success, requiring decades of concentration in an abstract realm which is, moreover, not appreciated by the rest of humanity and held suspect even by other scientists, seems to preclude a normal involvement in human affairs, let alone an outstanding one. Where are the mathematicians to rival Richard Feynman or Linus Pauling? Not surprisingly, most maths anecdotes hinge on eccentricity rather than humanity: mathematicians forget their names, can't decide what's 'obvious', and consider spherical cows. Some of the biographies of mathematicians I've read have been, frankly, boring–not only are the lives a bit boring but the authors are often not mathematicians and simply skip over the work itself. Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose? There always seems to remain an unremarked gap between the subject's work and personal life. In fact, this is a problem with all scientific biographies, especially of mathematicians', whose subject is so far out of the realm of everyday life. Perhaps Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind was successful because John Nash's work and personal life impinged on each other more than they do for most of us. Nasar strongly brought this out. So strongly, in fact, that the book was criticized for overemphasizing the supposed link between madness and genius. There must be more to us than that.

These thoughts were prompted by reading The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers by Benjamin Yandell, following a rave review by John Stillwell in SIAM Review (vol. 44(4), 2002). This book goes a long way towards meeting my objections. Yandell has done a lot of original research and talked to many of the mathematicians involved. He combines many interesting short biographies with summaries of the mathematics. (The interest is partly due to the interesting times, Germany in the 1930s). After reading this book, I still don't understand what class field theory is, but that may not be the author's fault. I then remembered two earlier enjoyable reads, lives of André Weil and of Jean van Heijenoort; I dug out an old review I wrote of them and (employing my sweeping editorial powers) have slipped it into this issue. Instead of the donnish atmosphere of Hardy's Apology and Littlewood's Miscellany on which I was raised, all quad and oval, the stage of these lives is the whole twentieth century.

If–Yandell aside–biographers won't (or aren't allowed to) include mathematical material, the alternative is to turn to academic histories of mathematics. These works, though, rapidly become so arcane that history becomes just another (inaccessible) speciality. My favourite must be Imre Lakatos's Proofs and Refutations (see the recent Proofs and Confirmations, on the alternating sign conjecture, for more on the title) but, more recently, the monumental Emergence of the theory of Lie groups by Thomas Hawkins, though hard going, comes close. He really tries to get at the roots of where the ideas came from and why they arose. Jordan 'proved' that all matrices can be diagonalized; the known counterexamples not considered significant, since they only concerned 'special' values of the entries of the matrix. As late as 1927 Felix Klein was praising this 'generic' approach to mathematics. By contrast, the obscure Wilhelm Killing discovered Lie algebras independently of Lie and set out to classify them, doggedly including every nongeneric case. He died unhappy because not only was the classification unfinished–it is still unfinished today–he hadn't even started on what he considered his main problem, to classify all Lie algebra actions and hence, in his view, all possible geometries.

In the words of the citation for the 2001 Whiteman prize won by Hawkins, this book "displays to the full Hawkins's deeply held belief that mathematical understanding grows when the underlying motivations and the original, informal, intuitive conceptions are uncovered and illuminated. It also interweaves the critical human dimension into the story through extensive quotation of the mathematician's private correspondence." So I think now I've argued myself into a corner. There is great material out there after all; people like Yandell and Hawkins are bringing it to us, and others (as in this citation) also sense the need for a synthesis. It just happens to be very, very difficult to achieve.

Robert McLachlan
Massey University

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

As you all know, a good mathematical friend of New Zealand, Bernhard Neumann passed away on the 21st October, 2002. We knew Bernhard not just through the legend, but because of his openness, friendliness, and mathematical vigor which lasted till the end. Personally, I remember he interviewed me for my first real job for a lectureship in Singapore, and I recall that much of the interview was devoted to red wine. There is a nice article about him in the Australian Mathematical Society Gazette, March Issue. He will be greatly missed.

The positive impact of the NZIMA is being felt throughout New Zealand, with another round of funding having gone through. Details will be found elsewhere in the Newsletter. I wonder if students appreciate the remarkable opportunities they are having with so many meetings, scholarships and programmes available. Details of meetings in January and February 2004 will be found also later in the Newsletter. It will be interesting to see the impact of a similar CoE operating in Australia.

The other major item affecting at least the tertiary institutes is the PBRF. I cannot, at this stage, foresee the consequences of this for mathematics. Given the general excellence of mathematics within New Zealand, my hope is that it will be relatively benign to us.

Council News:
The fact that there is no Colloquium this year may have some effect on the annual general meeting and election of officers. The council will be in touch about this. The council has decided to support the initiative of the Royal Society to have a formal occasion where the winners of annual awards (in our case the Research Award and the Aitken Prize) of the constituent societies will be honoured in one place. Details are still being worked out. It is anticipated that this will be in around November.

Over the last 20 years there have been a series of predictions of shortages of mathematicians. Ever since Euclid, I am told standards have been falling. (Have you ever actually looked at what they taught in the 50's?) However, there really does seem some cause for concern for New Zealand in a global market for teachers, academics, statisticians, the mathematically trained teachers. It seems that there are growing shortages. This is food for thought, for our planning in the next few years and for advice we are giving students.

Rod Downey
Victoria University of Wellington

PRESIDENT’S REPORT 2001-2002

This report covers the period from the last AGM in December 2001 till December 2002. It seems to me a good time to reflect on the changes in the mathematical landscape in New Zealand since the formation of the Society. Much has changed. Many things are very positive for mathematics in New Zealand, a tribute to the high quality of mathematical research in New Zealand.

Visiting Lecturers
Since this was the 25th anniversary year, it was decided to have two visiting lecturers.

1. NZMS Visiting Lecturer(s)
   The decision was taken at the last council meeting to commemorate the 25th anniversary year by having two NZMS visiting lecturers. They were John Butcher of The University of Auckland and Jim Geelen from the University of Waterloo. Both lecturers gave fine series of talks, and we thank them.
2. Forder Lecturer 2003
   The 2003 Forder Lecturer for 2003 will be Caroline Series of the University of Warwick. The British Council, which has previously supported this activity has declined to support Professor Series. The LMS is committed to this scheme and is looking into the matter for future lecturers. Shaun Hendy is organizing Professor Series visits, and you will be hearing from him soon. Professor Series is noted for her presentations, as we look forward to an exciting visit.

(Sir) Vaughan Jones
Two wonderful events this year were Vaughan's being made an honorary member of the LMS and of course his becoming a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. We extend congratulations to Vaughan, and thank him for his unwavering support of NZ mathematics. Sadly, Vaughan's father died in November this year. We also extend our condolences at this loss.

Membership
Membership is now 235. This is down a little from 249 last year. We also have one new Fellow of the NZMS and an accreditation to be presented at the Colloquium.

NZMS Research Award
The 2001 award went to Warren Moors. The 2002 award will be announced at the NZMS dinner at the Colloquium. We would ask that more people be nominated for this award. We thank this year's committee of Mike Steel, Gaven Martin and Vernon Squire who assist with the selection process.

Aitken prize
The 2001 Aitken prize for the best student talk at the 2001 Colloquium was

Brian van Dam (Auckland)
"The construction method of resolutions and Dowker spaces"

Additionally there were four highly commended talks:

Nicolette Moir (Auckland)
"A new 'fifth' order method for solving ordinary differential equations"
Patrick Rynhart (Massey)
"Mathematical modelling of granulation" Will Wright (Auckland)
"Some practical general linear methods" Shona Yu (Massey)
"Zeros of chromatic polynomials and broken wheels"

Thanks to the committee of David Gauld (chair), Peter Fenton, Mick Roberts and Gillian Thornley who made these fine selections from a very good range of student talks.

Math Olympiad
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. The council has voted to commit to supporting this each year in the future.

Royal Society of New Zealand
The RSNZ has had a number of changes in its relationship with its constituent bodies. Shaun Hendy has represented the NZMS in several discussions. Professor Andy Philpott has been elected to the Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand to Chair the Mathematical and Information Science and Technologies Electoral College. Congratulations to Graham Weir and Robert McLachlan for their election to the Fellowship. Robert is also to be congratulated on his personal chair.

NZMS Grants
Council made the following grants in 2001--2:

1. Student grants $2000 (4 grants).
2. Maths Colloquium 2001 $2500 (NZMS Speaker $1500, student support $1000).
3. Approximation theory conference $400 (Rick Beatson).
   Topology Conference $400 (David Gauld).
4. NZ Journal Mathematics $1000 (inclusive of arrears–see treasurer's report; another $1000 has been paid for 2002-3 year).
   TOTAL $6300

Investments
After a lot of discussion last year, the council, particularly through the efforts of Rua and Robert looked at many options for more aggressive investment. After due consideration, in the end, given the world situation, it was decided to continue with the previous more conservative investments. We expect this will continue until world markets recover. Rua will speak to this at the AGM.

Centre of Research Excellence
This year there was the exciting news that there have been the formation of two CoRE's of relevance to the NZMS.

One was the NZIMA headed by Vaughan Jones and Marston Conder, as directors, and with a large group of New Zealand mathematicians on the governing board. Funding for 2003 was provided to the following programmes:

Numerical methods for evolutionary problems (John Butcher, Auckland)
- middle part of 2003,
Phylogenetic genomics (Mike Steel, Canterbury)
- first half of 2003,
Logic and computation (Rob Goldblatt, Wellington)
- late 2003 and early 2004,
Modelling cellular function (Nicolas Smith, Auckland)

Partial support in the form of $100,000 for scholarships was provided to

Industrial mathematics (Robert McKibbin, Massey at Albany)
- second half of 2003.

There are two visiting Maclaurin fellowships
David Evans (University of Bristol), first half of 2003 and Richard Laugesen (University of Illinois at Urbana), first half of 2003. The inaugural Maclaurin Fellows is Rod Downey Victoria University (2003).

There are four PhD scholarships, $20,000 in small grants to support meetings, and finally a grant of $10,000 to assist with expenses in training and sending a New Zealand team to the 2003 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

The Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution is also hosting programmes of interest to our members in 2003+ including the phylogeny meeting in Kaikoura.

When combined with the NZMRI meetings in New Plymouth January, 2003 and Nelson, 2004, this indicated great opportunities for mathematics in the next years!

We are also pleased to see that Victoria in Australia has recently decided to begin such a Centre.

Australian-NZ Mathematical Societies and ICIAM 2003
We continue to cooperate with the Australian Mathematical Society. As our annual Colloquium for 2003 will be embedded into ICIAM, the Council urges all of its members to attend. While ICIAM is an applied mathematics conference, the organizing committee has made sure that there is a wonderful pure mathematics stream with a stellar group of speakers. The speakers include Charles Feffermann, Hillel Furstenberg, Hendrik Lenstra, Cheryl Praeger, Wilfred Schmidt, in addition to the 27 ICIAM speakers. We have set aside special monies for grants in aide for Society members to attend with special priority given to students. (The council has decided to increase the potential student support to $1000, subject to numbers.)

Have a look at the site

http://www.austms.org.au/iciam2003/

Israel Mathematical Society-New Zealand Mathematical Society
Following discussions with Vitali Milman, president of the Israel mathematical society, we will be having an International meeting based around the societies in Wellington, early February, 2004. Current plenary speakers include

Ran Raz (Weizmann Institute),
Victor Palamodov (Tel Aviv University) and
Janos Makowsky (Technion) on the Israel side and the New Zealand plenary speakers are being determined.

There are a number of Israeli mathematicians planning to attend, so this is quite an exciting initiative.

Chile
Chile is rather strong in mathematics, and is seeking to establish connections with New Zealand. They have a center of research excellence in mathematical modelling, and a both an economy, and a science funding system similar to ours. I have had discussions with Eric Goles who occupies a position similar to a minister of Science in Chile (president of CONICYT and he's a mathematician!), and we will be planning some exchanges and joint meetings, perhaps, along the lines of the Israel one. I plan to pursue this in the coming year. Stay tuned.

Special Thanks
Council members Bill Barton, Robert McLachlan, and Graeme Wake are finishing their terms after sterling service. Thanks to them. I personally wish to especially thank Graeme for his help with matters presidential. While he is staying on council, Charles Semple is stepping down from being secretary. Again thanks for all his work in that capacity.

Rod Downey
Victoria University of Wellington

LOCAL NEWS

AGRESEARCH

The Genstat conference in Western Australia was attended by five AgResearch biometricians, comprising 80\% of the South Island biometricians plus Zaneta Park-Ng as the representative of the smaller northern isle. Busselton, on the coast south of Perth, was a very pleasant venue, and the 80 attendees had a great time, being stimulated scientifically by the varied talks and socially by local entities such as humpback whales, wineries and even a solar eclipse. David Baird was an invited speaker, talking on "Updates to the Genstat spreadsheet and data manipulation in Release 6" and "Using Genstat for microarray analysis." Peter Johnstone talked on "A procedure to randomly generate 1 and 2 dimensional designs for blocks of natural size," Roger Littlejohn on "A Genstat procedure for population genetic data analysis" and Dave Saville on "Multiple comparison procedures: consistency and family-size robustness." After the conference David Baird took off to work on GenStat at VSN in England over the summer, also stopping off in Bangladesh, China and Korea on the way.

Benoîit Auvray has started a two year appointment working with Ken Dodds (biometrician at Invermay) on linkage disequilibrium mapping of quantitative traits in sheep. The project is funded by Ovita and he is based at Invermay. Benoîit comes from Belgium and has a background in computing for animal breeding applications.

Gwenda Hill, who is Head of Mathematics at The Taieri High School, has a Royal Society teaching fellowship and is working with the Invermay biometrics staff this year. She has been teaching for 28 years and is enjoying the opportunity to observe some of the applications of statistics. The CAST program, written by Doug Stirling, is one of the things that Gwenda is interested in studying, with a view to writing guidelines so that this interactive program can be used in secondary schools. Gwenda was an inaugural recipient of the Jim Campbell Award presented by the NZ Association of mathematics teachers and the NZ Mathematics Society for Excellence in Teaching. Last year she had a book published. This book, "Units in Maths," is designed for students who need basic arithmetic skills development and helps them earn credits towards their National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) and National Certificate of Employment Skills.

The AgResearch Statistics/Bioinformatics group's annual 3-day "get-together" will be in April at Ruakura. This is an occasion for discussing issues of mutual concern, organising fresh initiatives, giving morning talks to each other, and meeting newcomers such as Katarina Domijan (see photo), Benoîit Auvray and Gwenda Hill. As part of the meeting we will attend the workshop by Trevor Hastie on "Popular Methods for Supervised Learning" (http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/hastie_workshop.html) which also will be held at Ruakura.

Mick Roberts has left AgResearch to take up a position as Associate Professor of Mathematics on the Albany campus of Massey University. All the best for your new position there Mick!

Ken Louie has transferred from the Grasslands campus (Palmerston North) to Ruakura (Hamilton) and is currently enjoying the wonderful Waikato (ask me again after a few pea-soupers during winter though...) He has also taken over as the AgResearch correspondent to this newsletter. Thanks to Mick Roberts for filling this post over the past few years.

Ken Louie

THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

Department of Computer Science

Professor Jim Goodman, from the University of Wisconsin, has started in the Department of Computer Science. He has a distinguished international reputation as a leader in computer architecture. He was instrumental in building and shaping the Computer Science Department in Wisconsin, and he is a strong supporter of building a dynamic graduate programme. After he had accepted the appointment as Professor in our Department of Computer Science, he was astonished to discover that his great-great-grandfather's brother William Steadman Aldis was the first Professor of Mathematics and Mathematical Physics at Auckland University College, from 1884 to 1893. For information about Professor Aldis, consult the paper by Garry J. Tee on 'Professor and Mrs Aldis: mathematics, feminism and astronomy in Victorian Auckland', Southern Stars, Vol. 38 No. 1, September 1998, 18--27. Dr Vinton Cerf, one of the creators of the Internet, gave a public lecture in Auckland in February, providing a rare opportunity for the community to hear from that renowned American scientist. Dr Cerf co-designed the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which enabled the Internet creation, and he is now helping NASA build an interplanetary version of the technology. His visit was sponsored by the Knowledgewave Trust and The University of Auckland, with his travel expenses supported by the US Embassy. In the middle of March, all members of the Department shifted into floors 3, 4 and 5 of the new extension to the Science Centre, and some members of the Departments of Mathematics and of Statistics shifted into other floors. There is now much more computing laboratory space than in the previous building. Workmen are still continuing to install the plumbing, the cement work, the carpentry, the wiring, the locks, the bookshelves, the window shades et cetera et cetera.

Seminars

Professor Reinhard Klette, "Combinatorial results on incidence pseudographs".

Professor Gerald Sommer (Institut für Informatik und Praktische Mathematik, Kiel), "Pose estimation of 3D free-form contours in conformal geometry", and "Monogenic signal and Poisson scale-space".

Cristophe Diot (Sprint), "Measurement effort at Sprint: performance data from AS 1239".

Neal Glew (Intel Corporation), "Open runtime platform: flexibility with performance using interfaces".

Dr Yejing Wang (University of Wollongong), "A survey of traitor tracing".

Professor Dan Nicolau (Swinburne University of Technology), "Nanomechanics of protein molecular motors - an(other) opportunity for biocomputation?".

Dr Vinton Cerf (WorldCom), "The Internet: its future and the opportunities it presents".

Mark Moir (Sun Microsystems Laboratories), "Non-blocking memory management support for dynamic-sized data structures".

Gill Dobbie, "Know your data: correctness and semantics".

Dr Lindsay Groves (Victoria University of Wellington), "A formal approach to program evolution".

Professor Hideo Saito (Keio University), "Analysis and synthesis of multiple view movie by computer vision-based approach".

Robert Amor, "Construction IT challenges for computer science".

Garry J. Tee

Department of Engineering Science

Martyn Nash, one of our BE and PhD graduates, has returned to the department (and the Bioengineering Institute) as a Lecturer. For more details see the New Colleagues section later in this issue.

Andrew Pullan has been awarded a James Cook Research Fellowship, and so for the next two years he can forget about teaching and concentrate on his research. David Ryan has received the IFORMS prize for teaching and the IFORS Lecturer Award for 2002.

We have two visitors spending a couple of months with us, namely David Schaeffer from the Department of Mathematics, Duke University and Michael Mortell from the Department of Applied Mathematics, University College Cork. Each is teaching a module of Mathematical Modelling 4 on "Stability and bifurcations" and "Financial mathematics", respectively. David is working with Ian Collins on problems involving granular flows, while Mick is an aerodynamicist visiting Mike O'Sullivan.

Don Nield

Department of Mathematics

Dr Hannah Bartholomew has been appointed as Lecturer in the Mathematics Education Unit, and she is due to arrive on April 18.

Warren Moors arrived from Waikato University on January 1, and he is now a Lecturer here. Glenn Bryant is our Teaching Fellow for 2003.

Paul Bonnington has been appointed Associate Dean (for Information Technology) in the Faculty of Science. Tsukasa Yashiro has been awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Tsukasa will take up his fellowship in Osaka later this year. Marston Conder attended the musical ceremony at ANU on December 13, commemorating Bernhard Neumann.

Several senior members of the Department have moved into the very confused conditions on Floor 2 of the new extension to the Science Centre. Dr Primoz Potocnik, from the University of Ljubljana, is visiting from 2003 February 10 until April 15. He will be teaching the first half of Maths 328. Dimitrios Antoniou FRCS is a surgeon, who is helping establish a Department of Mathematics and Human Physiology at the University of Ioannina, Greece. He is visiting for six months to study dynamics with Chris King, including the Maths 745 reading course.

Recent visitors include Professor Jon Alperin (University of Chicago), Professor Len Bos (University of Calgary), Professor Kevin Burrage (University of Queensland), Professor Thomas Branson (University of Iowa), Professor Harry Dym (Weizmann Institute), Professor Paul Fong (University of Illinois - Chicago), Professor Kengo Hirachi (University of Tokyo), Dr Zdzislaw Jackiewicz (Arizona State University), Professor Mike Newman (ANU), Dr Pawel Nuroski (Uniwersytet Warszawski), Professor Jorn B Olsson (University of Copenhagen), and Professor Michael Vaughan-Lee (Oxford University).

Twenty people attended the 6th Devonport Topology Festival on Friday 2003 February 21, including two from Waikato and two overseas visitors. Paul Bonnington gave an invited talk "Toroidal triangulations are geometric", and talks were contributed by nine other attendees. For the first time grey weather discouraged the lunchtime swimmers, but the cricket and table tennis were pursued as enthusiastically as ever. In the evening, the participants were joined by partners for dinner on the deck.

We took advantage of the presence of three visiting algebraists to hold a series of lectures on February 13:

Professor Jon Alperin (Chicago), "Navarro's McKay correspondence",

Professor Mike Newman (ANU), "Cayley's general problem",

Professor Michael Vaughan-Lee (Oxford), "Counting p-groups",

Professor Gaven Martin, "The arithmetic groups having presentation <x, y : x^p = y^q = [x,y]^r = ...>".

From August 2002 to February 2003, Colin Fox visited the Centro de Investigacion en Matimaticas (CIMAT, {www.cimat.mx) in Gunajuato, México, as Investigador Titular "A". CIMAT is one of about 30 federally-funded research institutes that are outside México's university system. CIMAT looks after the mathematical sciences with research groups in Basic (Pure) Mathematics, Computer Science, and Probability and Statistics. It also has a strong PhD program, and most groups contribute to the undergraduate degree at the nearby University of Guanajuato. Like all well-funded research institutes, CIMAT has about the same number of support staff as researchers. It has stunning views, and has its own hotel in a beautiful colonial hacienda, that is free for visiting scholars. In December 2002 Colin Fox attended the Acoustical Society of America's annual conference, in Cancún on the Mexican Carribean. David Gauld attended the NZMRI workshop, in New Plymouth from January 4 to 12. In February, Gaven Martin was an honorary Italian (!) at the "Trilateral workshop in Analysis" between Australia/Italy/Taiwan, delivering a plenary address on holomorphically parametrised isotopies. In March, Gaven's James Cook Fellowship was extended for a year; and in April/May he'll be a Visiting Professor at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. His recent book with Iwaniec was given a Featured Review by the AMS–thus it was judged by them to be one of the top 100 important mathematical publications (not just books) for 2002. Arkadii Slinko is currently on sabbatical leave, visiting the Central Institute of Mathematics and Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and the Moscow Independent University. He gave a colloquium lecture on "Ranking Committees, Words, or Multisets" in that Institute, and he will speak in the GLOBUS seminar at Moscow Independent University in May. Arkadii will spend April in France, first visiting the University of Caen for cooperation with Vincent Merlin and Dominique Lepelley, and he will give a colloquium lecture. On the way back he will spend two weeks in Paris visiting Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he will be visiting Bernard Monjardet and he is scheduled to speak at the seminar "Discrete Mathematics and Social Sciences" on April 28. He and Geoffrey Pritchard (Statistics) have just finished a paper "On the minimum average size of manipulating coalition". Sanka Liyanage has successfully defended his PhD thesis in Mathematics Education and has been awarded the degree, subject to "making specified minor corrections to the thesis to the satisfaction of" his supervisor. He is currently employed as a mathematics teacher at McLean's College. Sanka is probably the first Maldive Islander to become a Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics. Will Wright is now at the University of Oslo whilst his examiners were at The University of Auckland, communicating by teleconferencing. The technician operating the link disappeared off-screen - but the viva voce examination continued, and the examiners recommended that Will be awarded a PhD for his thesis on numerical analysis, subject to minor amendments.

Louise Parsons, who graduated as MSc from this Department, has recently completed her PhD in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, with a dissertation on "Low-Dimensional Models of Near Wall Turbulent Flows Over Compliant Surfaces".

On March 20 the Australian Minister for Education, Science and Training announced that 24 outstanding researchers have been awarded the Commonwealth Government's prestigious 2003 Federation Fellowships, totalling 34.8 million dollars. In particular, Kevin Burrage (now at the University of Queensland) has received a Fellowship, for his project on "Stochastic Modelling of Genetic Regulatory Networks".

Seminars

Professor Paul Gartside (University of Pittsburg), "Universal functions and metrization".

Dr Hannah Bartholomew (King's College London), "Meeting the needs of individuals: some dilemmas and tensions from individualised mathematics classrooms".

Dr S Rauch-Wojciechowski (Linköping University), "From Jacobi problem of separation of variables to theory of quasi-potential Newton systems".

Professor Harry Dym (Weizmann Institute), "Reproducing kernels and inverse problems".

Professor Jorn B Olsson (University of Copenhagen), "Generalized blocks and symmetric groups".

Professor Kengo Hirachi (University of Tokyo), "Q-curvature in conformal and CR geometries".

Professor Jonathan Alperin (University of Chicago), "The stable equivalence problem".

Dr David Evans (University of Bristol), "Beaches, barriers and balls from Stokes through Stoker to the present day".

Professor Gordon Mason (University of New Brunswick), "Nearrings of group endomorphisms".

Brian van Dam, "A non-metrisable manifold from resolutions", and "Prüfer-type manifolds as illustrated by resolutions".

Professor Shamil Galiev (Mechanical Engineering), "The theory of nonlinear trans-resonant wave phenomena, and examination of Charles Darwin's earthquake reports".

Dr Primoz Potocnik (University of Ljubljana), "Regular covers of graphs and their symmetries".

Professor William Duke (UCLA), "Reciprocity laws, elliptic curves, and the Riemann Hypothesis".

Dr David McIntyre, "Characterising continuous functions on compact spaces".

Dr Stephen Coleman (Civil and Environmental Engineering), "Waves in submerged particulate beds".

Dr Pawel Nuroski (Uniwersytet Warszawski), "An analogy between second order ODEs and 3-dimensional Cauchy-Riemann structures".

Dr Jiling Cao, "Volterra spaces revisited".

Garry J. Tee

Department of Statistics

Megan Jowsey (Head of Mathematics at Birkenhead College) is the 2003 Teaching Fellow. Professor Keith Worsley (McGill University) is visiting for March and April, including a tour of several Indian cities as the 2003 Mahalanobis Lecturer. Dr Andrew Balemi is employed (on a short-term contract) as lecturer. Recent visitors include Professor Brant Deppa (Winona State College, Minnesota), Dr Robert Easterling (SANDIA Corp.) and Professor Robert Gentleman (Harvard).

Several members of the Department have moved into the confused conditions of the new extension to the Science Centre. The lecturers teaching Stage One courses in Statistics have received a Distinguished Teaching Award.

Seminars

Professor David R Brillinger (Berkeley), "Risk Analysis in geoscience and remote sensing".

Dr Mark Clements (ANU), "Lung cancer mortality prediction using multi-state population smoking models".

Dr Seisho Sato (The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo), "e-decomp and parallel environment for R or S".

Dr Junji Nakano (The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo), "Jasp: An e-statistical system using Java technologies".

Dr John M Chambers (Lucent Bell Laboratories), "Who will use statistics? Making statistical software available".

Dr Bryan FJ Manly (Western EcoSystems Technology), "Tests of bioequivalence with non-normal distributions and unequal V".

Professor Kavita Ramanan (Carnegie-Mellon University), "Analysis of an optimal scheduling discipline for telecommunication networks".

Dr Yoshihiko Maesono (Kyushu University), "Asymptotic distributions of U-statistics".

Dr Daryl J Daley (ANU), "Modelling long range dependence and point processes".

Professor Trevor Hastie (Stanford University), "Independent component analysis by product density estimation".

Dr Robert G Easterling (SANDIA Corp.), "Statistical foundations for the validation of computer models".

Professor Keith J Worsley (McGill University), "Heritability random fields".

Garry J. Tee

UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

The department welcomes Dominic Lee from Singapore who has recently arrived with his wife and two children. Dominic is about to begin a lectureship in Statistics here at Canterbury.

The department also welcomes Wim Hordijk who will be a postdoc with us for the rest of this year. Wim is originally from Holland, but has spent several years recent years on postdocs around the world - including the Sante Fe Institute, and most recently in Brazil. He has also been a mountain-bike guide in the US and involved in search and rescue. Wim's postdoc is funded by the Allan Wilson Centre.

Douglas Bridges is in Munich for a year, as a DAAD Gastprofessor at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität. He will be teaching three courses in the International Masters Programme there: one on Constructive Analysis, one on Foundations of Constructive Mathematics, and one on Numerical Analysis for Computer Scientists. He'll also be continuing his research programme with Peter Schuster, Hajime Ishihara, and (when she joins them for five months in April) Simona Vita.

Seminars

Johannes G Maks (Delft University of Technology), "Flats in PG(9,2) which are external to the Grassmannian of lines in PG(4,2)".

Professor Nigel Cutland (University of Hull), "A survey of nonstandard techniques and applications in fluid mechanics".

Professor Phillippe Toint (University of Namur), "The filter idea and its application to the nonlinear feasibility problem".

Professor Greg Reid (University of Western Ontario), "Numerical Jet Geometry".

Robert Ware, "Three studies in numerical methods for statistical approximation".

Associate Professor Chris Triggs (The University of Auckland), "Statistical Problems in Forensic Science".

Professor Randy Eubank (Texas A& M University), "Prediction Using Functional Regression Analysis".

Professor Satish Iyengar (University of Pittsburgh), "Models for integrate-and-fire neurons".

David Elliott (University of Tasmania), "Sigmoidal - Trapezoidal Quadrature".

Associate Professor Margaret M Wiecek (Clemson University), "Convex Cones to Aid Decision Making in Multi-criteria Programming".

Rainer Löwen (Technische Universität Braunschweig), "The 'oval conjecture' for planar partition surfaces".

Wim Hordijk, "Dynamics, Emergent Computation, and Evolution in Cellular Automata".

Charles Semple

INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH LIMITED

Applied Mathematics Team

Shaun Hendy now has a joint position with IRL and the MacDiarmid Institute at the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences at Victoria University. One quarter of Shaun's time will be at Victoria, involving some teaching and supervision of graduate students, and research for the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology.

Shaun and Graham Weir attended the Maths Colloquium in Auckland in December. Graham gave a talk on "Newton's Coefficient of Restitution" and Shaun talked about "Modelling the Growth and Structure of Passive Films on Metals". Shaun also attended AMN-1 in Wellington. This was a conference on Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology that was organised by the MacDiarmid Institute. Shaun gave a talk on "Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Lead Clusters" and presented two posters.

Two German students joined us on March 3 as part of the practical semester for their degrees. Eva Kasier and Adrijana Juricev are both from the the University of Applied Science in Stuttgart and will be with us for another four months.

Finally, David and Peggy Schaeffer visited us on the 11--12th of February. David Schaeffer is professor of Mathematics at Duke University in North Carolina.

Shaun Hendy

MASSEY UNIVERSITY

Institute of Fundamental Sciences
(Palmerston North)
Mathematics

Here at mathematics we have a circus the whole year round. While we were still processing the Semester 2 examination results, the first assignments for Semester 3 rolled in. In Semester 3 we offered three papers extramurally at one hundred level. All staff were involved in some way. We introduced a roster system and the person on duty dealt with the inquiries for all papers. A special e-mail address was created for the Semester 3 courses. This scheme worked very well so that all staff could spend some time doing some research and attending conferences. Again when these 3rd Semester exam results were being processed Semester 1 had started. Now we are half way through Semester 1 and are looking forward to the Easter 'break'. Again not much of a break for most of us since the four days before Good Friday are devoted to the extramural contact courses. However, one consolation prize is the lunch with the extramural students kindly provided by the Institute. These informal gatherings are very successful and fruitful as students can discuss their options, getting instant replies to their questions and meeting the staff involved in the papers they may wish to take.

It has become evident that the offering of these three 100 level papers in Semester 3 does not influence the number of enrolments in the other semesters which of course is very encouraging.

It is unfortunate that hardly any of us could make it to the Colloquium held in Auckland. We were still finalising the examination results and Semester 3 had been in full swing for a month. Please, colleagues in Auckland, do accept that there were no hard feelings against you. We simply could not close the circus down. We ran two on-campus courses that started on the Friday after the Colloquium. These required preparations like setting a test and getting the appropriate notes out. And of course the piles of hand-outs students expect. Also, the final examinations were almost due before the Semester 3 courses had hardly started!

This semester we are running a bridging paper "Foundation Mathematics and Statistics" as part of a Certificate of University Preparation for students who do not have University Entrance. This complements the paper (and Certificate) already offered at this level for students who have not previously studied through the medium of English. Since we already teach foundation papers for credit in our regular degree programmes, we seem to be directing more and more of our effort into teaching material that is also covered in fifth and sixth form mathematics. The teaching of the Certificate papers is being contracted out to part-time staff, the newest appointee being Robin Rutherford who is teaching the new paper. There are 60 students instead of 20 as expected and planned for, which has caused all sorts of stresses and complications for Robin (including a trebling of her teaching hours), but nevertheless she is finding the work rewarding. Still, the increasing demand for papers of this nature is cause for concern.

As mentioned in the previous local news Kee Teo was invited to National University of Singapore (NUS) as a Visiting Scientist at the end of last year for three months. His timing was wrong, as it rained almost every day during his stay there. As a consequence, he says, he had nothing better to do most of the time but to do some research. Kee was working on a book on chromatic polynomials in collaboration with Professor Khee-Meng Koh of NUS and Dr Feng-Ming Dong of Nanyang Technological University. It was not all work and no play though. Kee enjoyed the three festive seasons: Malay New Year, Christmas, and Chinese New Year. He managed to find time to visit friends and relatives. He also went to the village where he was born.

Professor Bob Richardson from Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina is visiting us this semester and is making a huge contribution to our efforts to improve and extend the WebCT component of our teaching. He is also sharing his experience with us as we wrestle with the problem of how best to use graphical and symbolic manipulation software to enhance our teaching of calculus. And he likes it so much here that he has bought a house in Pahiatua! He plans to spend Northern winters with us after he retires next year, and to keep up his contribution to our teaching activities.

A number of Massey people attended the NZMRI summer workshop, including Charles Little, who writes: "Massey was extraordinarily well represented at the New Zealand Mathematical Research Institute's summer workshop, which was held this year during January 5--11. Participants from Massey included Catherine McCartin, Barbara Holland, Korrakot Chartarrayawadee, John Hudson, James Matheson and Paul Gardner and I. We were treated to some outstanding speakers, seven from America and one each from Canada, Britain and Germany. It was my first experience at such a workshop and I was impressed".

Robert McLachlan writes: "Today (3 April) the winner of the inaugural Abel Prize (www.abelprisen.no) was announced upstairs by the Norwegian Academy. The prize (worth approximately $1.5m) goes to Jean-Pierre Serre. His initial reaction was "Oh." Meanwhile, we are wondering how we are going to get home, given that Massey is recommending a ban on all international travel."

From the Allan Wilson Centre:

The intersection of IFS and the Allan Wilson Centre currently contains five people, Mike Hendy (PI and Executive Director), Barbara Holland (post-doc), Paul Gardner and James Matheson (PhD students) and Tim White (Computer support and scientific programmer).

Barbara Holland was successful in obtaining an NZS\&T Post doctoral Fellowship, which brought her back from Bochum in Germany. She is currently working on a number of projects relating to evolutionary tree computations and efficient model strain selection, as well as completing the projects begun in Bochum. Results of her PhD thesis work have now appeared in the latest issue of Systematic Biology.

Paul Gardner is in the final stages of writing his thesis, which is planned for submission before this newsletter is completed. Then he will leave in July for a post-doc with Professor Robert Giegerich, at Bielefeld in Germany, where he will continue his investigation into RNA folding. Paul's PhD project here has been in Ribonomics, in both developing tools to search sequence databases for novel RNA "proteins", and investigating the question as to why, in the early evolutionary stage of the RNA world (which is postulated to precede contemporary DNA) the coding was restricted to just four nucleotides. A paper based on this has just appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (series B).

James Matheson, a local mathematics graduate, was successful in obtaining a 2003 Massey University Doctoral scholarship. He has just begun work on relating the evolution of viruses, particularly influenza. The historical records of influenza strains give a peculiar shaped evolutionary tree, which he is investigating.

Meanwhile Tim White has been assisting in the implementation of programs on HELIX, our 132 processor parallel computer run by IIMS at MU Albany. Much of the current usage of Helix has been by Allan Wilson Centre members, but it is available for outside usage, and any potential user should contact our business manager, Susan Wright (s.m.wright@massey.ac.nz).

Mike Hendy is preparing for a visiting professorship at l'Institut Henri Poincare, situated in the centre of Paris, for four weeks in May-June. He will be part of a teaching programme entitled "Mathematics, Informatics and Genomics" for French researchers, which will be followed by a one week research conference.

All of our subgroup attended the Helix workshop in January, and the annual phylogenetics meeting, held at Kaikoura in February. Because of its popularity, the Kaikoura meeting was over subscribed and attendance had to be limited to 50. The 2004 meeting will be held from February 16--20, at Whakapapa Village. Details are available on our website http://awcmee.massey.ac.nz/

Seminars

Professor R L (Bob) Richardson (Appalachian State University Boone, North Carolina), "WebCT for Mathematics. Linking mathematics to the outside world".

Marijcke Vlieg-Hulstman

Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences (Albany)

Mathematics

The start of 2003 has seen record growth in student numbers and the Albany campus now has over 6000 students. An impressive effort considering the university is only ten years old. This growth did lead to some strains on resources and there were some stressful first days to the semester.

Geoff Aldis from the mathematics department, UNSW at ADFA, Canberra was the first occupant of our new visitor's room. He spent a month working with Mick Roberts on a model for the invasion of a population by an infectious disease, and its containment by vaccination and/or quarantine.

Professor Graeme Wake is now with us for the first half of every week, spending Thursday and Friday at Canterbury University where he still has teaching commitments. Graeme is busy organising the Mathematics in industry study group which will be held in New Zealand in 2004 and 2005 as described in the article on page 22 of this newsletter.

Finally, the mathematicians have completed the move to their new building and are now enjoying larger offices and air-conditioning although some of us are missing being able to open the window.

Seminars

Robin K Milne (University of Western Australia), "Statistical Inference for Ion Channel Data".

Geoffrey Aldis (UNSW at ADFA, Canberra), "Models of tracer exchange during liver perfusion experiments".

Carlo Laing,"Pattern Formation in Neural Systems".

Mike Meylan

UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Boris Baeumer was on conference leave in December/January. He was invited to present a poster on "Advection and Dispersion in Time and Space" at the AGU meeting in San Francisco that was held from December 6-10. From 7-14 January he was invited main speaker at the International Conference on Evolution Equations, Control Theory, and Applications to Engineering Problems in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Unfortunately, due to widespread rioting the conference got cancelled and Boris gave his presentation at the organizers' home institution, Louisiana State University. He used the time between the conferences to conduct research for four weeks with colleagues in Reno, Nevada. He also gave a presentation at the University of Tuebingen in Germany while showing off his now one-year old son to his friends and relatives.

John Curran spent the second semester on leave in the northern hemisphere. On the way he attended the 2nd International Conference on the Teaching of Mathematics, in Hersonissos, Crete, which was a bigger (but hopefully no better) version of the Delta '03 conference he is helping with in Queenstown in November. The first 3 months he spent at the National University of Ireland, Galway, working in his area of algebra: group theory. He noted with interest that the new degree in financial mathematics introduced there included papers in group theory (and much other pure mathematics), so perhaps NZ can emulate the success of the "Celtic Tiger" by recommending this sort of background for its financial whiz kids! The last three months he spent at the Centre for Teaching Mathematics at Plymouth University, England, looking at some of the technology they use in presenting their mathematics courses.

Our fourth attempt at filling the vacant Chair in Statistics was unsuccessful and so the position will remain unfilled at least for the immediate future. To help fill the gap in teaching staff Darryl MacKenzie from Proteus Research will teach a large part of our stage 2 Design of Research Studies paper. The statisticians also appear to have been successful in convincing their mathematics colleagues of the virtues of statistics: Boris Baeumer will teach one half of the paper Probability and Inference 3. Nick Dudley Ward (recently The University of Auckland and University College London) taught a Summer School paper called 'Casino Studies' with a focus on applied probability and risk management.

With the onset of the New Year, Richard Barker and Markus Neuhäuser also started new tasks as Associate Editor of Biometrics and Communications in Statistics, respectively.

In February, Markus attended the First New Zealand Bioinformatics Conference in Wellington, where he presented a paper entitled "Exact tests for the analysis of case-control studies of genetic markers". We are looking forward to the Second Asia-Pacific BioInformatics Conference that will be held in Dunedin in January 2004 (see www.fit.qut.edu.au/~chenp/APBC2004 for further information).

John Harraway has been appointed Scientific Secretary for the International Programme Committee for ICOTS-7 (International Conference on Teaching Statistics) which is to be held in Brazil in the summer of 2006.

Claire Cameron, currently Senior Teaching Fellow at our department, started to do a PhD under supervision of Richard Barker.

Stephanie McConnon has stepped down as Organising Tutor in favour of working part time. Warren Palmer has taken on this position.

The last newsletter was written just prior to our HoD, Vernon Squire, co-convening the 16th IAHR International Symposium on Ice at the University of Otago from 2-6 December 2002. It was incredibly successful, with 150 participants from 17 different countries attending plus 20 accompanying persons. A total of 145 papers on river, sea and lake ice were presented on the theme of the conference, which was floating ice. Two volumes of the proceedings entitled Ice in the Environment were handed out at the Symposium, the third volume including discussion is being finalized at the moment. Dunedin weather was perfect, as it always is, a little dry and sunny perhaps but the delegates appreciated it. Two highlights–apart of course from the sessions themselves–were the tour on the peninsula, involving visits to the Marine Studies Centre, a cruise on the Monarch, the Royal Albatross Colony and Penguin Place, and the conference dinner at Lanarch Castle where a piper piped us in and we dined on a brace of freshly-caught, young haggis. We were amazingly lucky–everything went well and we have had an endless stream of positive email from the folk who attended.

A departmental review took place just before the IAHR Symposium and we have now had the written report back. Its pretty positive, mirroring a lot of the stuff we had said in our self-review. A few curriculum changes here and there to tidy things up, lots of statements that we can use to improve our lot, and the minimum of criticism.

This year will see the introduction of the PBRF, a process that Vernon especially will be involved in. It is going to make for a very interesting year that is expected to be full-on for all of us.

Visitors

Prior to the start of the semester, Stefan Steiner (University of Waterloo, Canada) visited the Department and presented the seminar "An Overview of Statistical Engineering".

Jennifer Hoeting and Geoff Givens, both Associate Professors at Colorado State University, are visiting the Department until the end of July. Their research interests are statistical computing, Bayesian methods, whale population dynamics (Geoff) and Bayesian statistics, spatial statistics, and model selection (Jennifer). They are jointly working on a statistical computing book. Last Saturday, however, they could be seen at Carisbrook watching the Highlanders narrowly lose to the Crusaders.

Jill Dietz, Associate Professor at St Olaf College, USA, is visiting until the end of June. Jill's research interest is algebraic geometry.

Miroslav Lovric, Associate Professor at McMaster University, Canada, is visiting until the end of April. Miro is working with Derek Holton on mathematics education. Another of his research interests is algebraic topology.

Lisa Avery, one of our statistics postgraduate students, celebrated the New Year by safely delivering a baby boy.

Seminars

John Williams (Department of Marketing), "Structural equation models for heterogeneous data: A finite mixture model approach".

Stefan Steiner (Institute for Improvement in Quality and Productivity, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo, Ontario Canada), "An overview of statistical engineering (Shainin methods). Seven habits of highly effective industrial problem solvers".

Bill Jackson (University of London), "Rigidity of frameworks and unique realizability of graphs".

David Evans (Department of Mathematics University of Bristol), "Scattering by narrow cracks in floating ice-sheets in finite water depth"

Ivan Reilly (The University of Auckland), "Topological concepts and language".

Richard Barker "Modeling birth processes and population growth using mark-recapture data".

Jennifer Hoeting (Colorado State University), "Statistical models for stream ecology data".

Derek Holton "Mathematics education–a philosophy".

Markus Neuhäuser, "Exact tests based on the Baumgartner-WeiB-Schindler statistic".

Miroslav Lovric (Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University, Canada), "Jumping over the fire: Mathematics issues in the high school to university transition".

Mike Paulin (Department of Zoology and Centre for Neuroscience), "Fractional derivatives in neural coding of motion: Implications for modelling distributed computation underlying perception and control of movement in animals and machines".

Lenette Grant

THE UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO

Department of Mathematics

We have a number of new appointments in the department. Dr Tim Stokes is due within the next few days to take up a lectureship. He was formerly at Murdoch University in Perth and has research interests in algebra. Another new lecturer is Dr Jacob Heerikhuisen who is on a six-month contract. He is a former PhD student from the department and has research interests in magnetohydrodynamics with emphasis on magnetic reconnection. The other new appointee is David Harder who has recently submitted his PhD thesis. He has a three-month appointment as a post-doctoral fellow working with Ernie Kalnins.

Congratulations are due to Sean Oughton on being promoted to Senior Lecturer. Sean spent two weeks in February at some workshops in Palm Springs and Laguna Beach. He had to endure hardships like staying at the Hilton. As an achievement of some sorts, Stephen Joe is across the bar in the Senior Lecturer scale for the third time. Stephen had James Lyness from Argonne National Laboratory visit him for a week in February.

Kevin Broughan has returned from research leave at Columbia University. While there, he also participated in seminars at Rutgers (Henryk Iwaniec's lectures) and NYU (Peter Sarnak's series). He reports that number theory is thriving in the New York area, with a joint number theory seminar programme between Columbia, NYU and City University organized to start in September 2003.

Now it's Ian Craig's turn to take study leave. Ian has left for the US and besides time there, plans to spend time in Italy and the UK. While Ian is away, Alfred Sneyd is Acting Chairperson.

Another traveller was Ernie. He spent three weeks in February in Minnesota. He also had a former postdoc, Jonathan Kress, visit for two weeks towards the end of January. Also visiting Ernie was Stefan Rauch-Wojciechowski from Linköping University in Sweden who visited for two months from last December.

Our first year student enrolments appear to be up on last year. However, because of the new student record system in use for the first time this year, it is not easy to be certain what the actual enrolment figures are.

Seminars

C Laing (Massey University, Albany), "Pattern formation in neural systems".

E Kalnins,] "Classical and quantum constants of the motion (explicit techniques)".

S Rauch-Wojciechowski (Linköping University), "From Jacobi problem of separation of variables to theory of quasi-potential Newton systems".

Stephen Joe

Department of Statistics

Things have been relatively quiet in the department lately. Nye John has returned from leave. At the end of his sabbatical he attended the GENSTAT conference which was held in Busselton, Western Australia. Also attending the conference was Dave Whitaker. Nye and Dave were visited in January by Emlyn Williams from CSIRO, Canberra. Emlyn was relieved to know that his home was not one of the ones destroyed by the disastrous bush fires, but the area he lives in was high risk, and many properties close to his, were destroyed.

Bill Bolstad and James Curran are both currently on leave. Bill is working on his book, "Introduction to Bayesian Statistics" which is to be published by Wiley later in the year. James is visiting England, where he is working in the Research and Development Unit of the Forensic Science Service. While he is away he hopes to catch up with Alain Vandal in Montreal. James and his wife Karin have a second daughter. They welcomed Fiona into their family in October, 2002.

Lyn Hunt was visited by Kaye Basford, from the University of Queensland in February. Bruce Miller (our part-time tutor) survived teaching our first year statistics course over Summer school.

An upcoming event in the department is the "One-Day Workshop on Popular Methods for Supervised Learning". This is to be conducted by Professor Trevor Hastie from Stanford University California. It will be held at the McMeekan Centre at Ruakura on April 3, 2003.

Seminars

Niall Broekhuizen (NIWA, Hamilton), "Verification of an individual-based model of the foraging of southern Buller's albatross by comparison with ship-board observations."

Bryan Manly (Western EcoSystems Technology Inc, Laramie, Wyoming, USA), "The assessment of forestry on northern spotted owls."

Robert G Newcombe (Reader in Medical Statistics, University of Wales College of Medicine Cardiff), "Confidence intervals for proportions and related quantities."

Martin Upsdell (AgResearch, Ruakura), "From analysis of means and analysis of coefficients to analysis of curves."

Marti J Anderson (Department of Statistics, Tamaki Campus, The University of Auckland), "Canonical analysis of principle coordinates: Flexible constrained ordination."

Mik Black (Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland), "Statistical issues in the design and analysis of spotted microarray experiments."

Judi McWhirter

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON

School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences

We welcome Yinhuo Zhang who took up a lectureship in February. He works on Hopf algebras, and comes to us from the University of the South Pacific. For more information on Yinhuo Zhang see the New Colleagues Section.

Asat Arslanov has joined us as a post-doc working on Kolmogorov complexity in part with Rod Downey.

Peter Komisarczuk is about to take up a senior lectureship in Computer System Engineering. He is an expert in networks, most recently working for Nortel in the UK.

Bill Naylor has a fixed term position in Computer Science. He has been working on computer algebra systems and projects such as OpenMath.

Rod Downey is working on his Maclaurin fellowship for the year, courtesy of NZIMA. As a result we have been able to invite a number of visitors who are contributing to the teaching programme. They include Srinivas Chakravarty working with Stefanka Chukova on warranty systems, Amparo Baillo, working with Estate Khmaladze on point processes and change sets, and Evan Griffiths has stayed on after his post-doc with Rod finished. We have also appointed Steven Archer, a PhD student of Geoff Whittle, as senior Tutor to administer our 100-level Maths courses.

Mark McGuinness is just back from visiting the Division of Applied Mathematics, Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea. As part of this applied mathematics collaboration between New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Korea, there is a meeting early in July to promote the idea of holding Mathematics-in-Industry Study Groups in South Korea in future years. Check out the URL: http://parter.kaist.ac.kr/imi/ and the article appearing elsewhere in this Newsletter.

Our congratulations go to Wu Guohua, Rod's FRST post-doc, who is now a proud father.

John Randal successfully completed his PhD in financial mathematics, and previously so did Fiona Walls on aspects of mathematics in the classroom, and Tracy Bai on statistical analysis of wireless communication systems.

The MATH and STOR groups are performing well at 100 level in regard to the university's goal of getting closer to the long term target to achieve Maori and Pacific enrolments in line with their proportion in the population (approx 14\% and 5.5\% respectively). In particular in terms of Maori enrolments all three offerings of STAT193 are close to 10\% Maori enrolment. Our first-year MATH courses are close to 10\% with MATH104 at 15\% and MATH114 (2/3) at 14\%. With Pacific Nations students our target is about 5.5\%. STAT193 (1/3) and MATH114 (2/3) have over 4\%, MATH104 has 5\% and the best is MATH103 at 8.5\%. However, none of our second year courses come close to meeting this target.

Estate Khmaladze was visited in January by Dr Spiridon Penev from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, who gave a talk on his research in wavelet methods. Professor Wolfgang Weil, Director of the Institute of Mathematics, University of Karlsruhe, Germany, will visit Victoria University of Wellington from 16 March to 15 April. Professor Weil is one of the world's leading specialists in differential geometry and he will work with Estate on his Marsden grant on "Local point processes in the neighbourhood of sets". Estate is currently two thirds of the way through a series of six seminars that he is presenting in Wellington on "Martingale Methods in Orthodox Statistics". Estate is also the Programme Chair of the Tbilisi Conference in Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics, to be held from 22--28 September 2003, devoted to the centenary of the birth of A N Kolmogorov. The conference is hosted by the Georgian Academy of Sciences, its A. Razmadze Mathematical Institute and N. Muskhelishvili Institute of Computational Mathematics, jointly with the Georgian Statistical Association.

Megan Clark spent ten days in the United States during February, as an invited guest of the National Institute of Health federal programme to increase cultural diversity in the biomedical professions and especially in research in the biomedical area. Given that the mathematical sciences are often an obstacle in this regard, Megan was "head hunted" and given five star treatment as a guest of the University of Kansas and the Haskell Indian Nations University. She evaluated the programmes currently in existence there, made suggestions for alterations, participated in discussions, and presented a seminar on what is done here in New Zealand (and at Victoria University of Wellington in particular).

Over December 2002 and January 2003, Yu Hayakawa visited Dr Paul Yip at the University of Hong Kong. Yu also worked with Dr Liping Liu from Peking University during that time. Dong Wang was invited to visit the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, RMIT University, Australia from 1 December 2002 to 14 February 2003. While there Dong was engaged in a multivariate research program; in particular, he worked on aspects of censored regression analysis and its applications.

David Vere-Jones was in Taiwan in November 2002, at the National Central University, where he lectured on point processes and earthquakes. On the way back to Wellington, David briefly visited Yosi Ogata and his student Jiancang Zhuang in Tokyo, Japan. David has had several visitors to Wellington already in 2003, including a return visit from Jiancang Zhuang, working on earthquake modelling and forecasting issues. Dr Shiyong Zhou, a lecturer at Peking University, has joined the Victoria University of Wellington Geophysics Institute for a year on an exchange lectureship, but will be working mainly with David Vere-Jones and David Harte on earthquake modelling and forecasting. Dr Daryl Daley arrived at Victoria University of Wellington early in March to work with David Vere-Jones for two weeks on Vol.\ II of the 2nd edition of their Springer monograph on point processes; Vol. 1 appeared in December 2002.

John Haywood spent quite a bit of the summer on parental leave looking after Helen, who arrived safely on 5 December 2002. Helen has enjoyed herself since then, teaching John and her mum quite a lot about nappies and fluid flow, and also helping to conduct an extensive research program into variable sleep patterns.

Yu Hayakawa is now the Statistics and Operations Research Program Director, while Dong Wang has taken on the role of Graduate Studies Coordinator. John Randal has secured a lectureship in econometrics/finance in the School of Economics and Finance at Victoria University of Wellington. Two new PhD students (Steven Johnston, who is on a Victoria University of Wellington Graduate Scholarship and Eldon Paki, who is on a Public Health Intelligence Graduate Scholarship) join Nuovella Williams in the STOR programme.

Seminars

Dr Spiridon Penev (Department of Statistics, UNSW, Sydney, Australia), "Approaches to improve the flexibility of wavelet-based methods in density estimation, regression and signal analysis".

Daniel Ballinger, Rilla Khaled, Craig Anslow, "Spreadsheet Visualisation / InspectJ / Visualising Reusable Components".

Estate Khmaladze, "Martingale Methods in Orthodox Statistics–Asymptotic theory of statistics of sequential ranks" (a series of six seminars).

Nigel Cutland (University of Hull), "A survey of nonstandard techniques and applications in fluid mechanics".

Rilla Khaled and Daniel Ballinger/Alex Potanin, "A Case Study of Visualisation using AspectJ, Spreadsheet structure inspection using low level access and visualisation".

Peter Komisarczuk (Nortel Networks, United Kingdom), "Ethernet Services for Next Generation Broadband".

Professor Alan Agresti, "One-Day Workshop on Analysis of Repeated Categorical Measurement Data".

Milton Ngan (Weta, Wellington), "Tales from the Two Towers".

Dr Daryl J Daley (Australian National University), "Modelling Long Range Dependence and Point Processes".

Ludwig Staiger, "How Much Can You Win When Your Adversary is Handicapped?"

Srinivas Chakravarthy (Kettering University, Flint, Michigan, USA), "The Batch Markovian Arrival Process: A Review and Future Work".

Srinivas Chakravarthy (Kettering University, USA), "Impact of worker cross-training in service systems".

Dr Mark Moir (Sun Microsystems, Boston), "Obstruction-Free Synchronization".

Sebastiaan Terwijn "Effective Measure and Hausdorff Dimension".

Mark McGuinness

[]