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Number 93     April 2005

NEWSLETTER

OF THE

NEW ZEALAND MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY (INC.)

Contents

PUBLISHER’S NOTICE
EDITORIAL
PRESIDENT’S COLUMN
LOCAL NEWS
CENTREFOLD
NEW COLLEAGUES
FEATURES
BOOK REVIEWS
CONFERENCES
NOTICES
Application for Membership of the NZMS

MATHEMATICAL MINIATURE 26 Mathematicians and light bulbs

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

It's been a good year for mathematics in the New Zealand media. Just to include programmes that I've caught a part of, Radio New Zealand has featured Keith Devlin on the Poincar'e conjecture, Marcus du Sautoy on the Riemann hypothesis (illustrating the importance of prime numbers with the worthy example shown by the 17 year cicadas) and Australian Clio Cresswell on the mathematics of sex (she of the infamous '12 bonk rule'). Our incredible summer season of conferences, at least 13 by my count, generated a fair amount of local publicity. Graeme Wake reports that media coverage of the MISG, while still ongoing, was an improvement from last year, when the Australian dailies covered the scientific content in depth but in New Zealand MISG ran in the 'odd spot'. This year Radio New Zealand ran features on both the rural and financial programmes, as well as a widely heard interview with Oxford's Sam Howison—although the papers again concentrated on the flap over Michael Cullen's fencing wire comments and not on the actual content of the study groups. Then on 11 April Documentary New Zealand screened 'The Other Olympiad', following the NZ maths olympiad team as they trained and competed in Athens in 2004. The team members came over extremely well, looking keen, relaxed, and well-rounded, as well as winning the medals that Arkadii Slinko had them marked out for. Slinko, in a superb yet understated performance, even managed to provide some mathematical content that didn't end up on the cutting room floor! This was surely the best possible publicity for mathematics and for the olympiad.

(TVNZ suggested the Association of Maths Teachers web site, www.nzamt.org.nz, for follow up. To you I'd recommend the 'Where are they now?' page on Australian olympians, www.amt.canberra.edu.au/olympian.html. Fascinating and at times disturbing.)

Now, who will be our Paul Callaghan?

Although your Newsletter represents fantastic value for money, the whole NZMS is a bit of a shoestring operation and the Newsletter is one of its larger projects. Therefore I'd like to particularly thank the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and Birkäuser for advertising with us. Together with recent sponsorship from Hoare Research Software they cover a good fraction of our printing costs. I'd also like to thank Springer and Birkäuser for providing books for review and encourage all our readers to try their hand at a review. Reviews of maths books seem to have evolved in a different direction than in other areas: sometimes, as in the epic reviews in the Bulletin of the AMS, they don't even mention the book under review. In fact, those are the best ones. Sometimes a gentle and, why not, boosterish introduction to a field is wanted.

By the end of this year I'll have completed six years as Editor and I've decided to step down, having reached but not surpassed the tenure of Mike Hendy. By then the newsletter will have been based in Palmerston North for 12 years so it could be time for a change. (No jokes, please.) Please forward any suggestions for future editors, or on how the Newsletter should evolve, to the secretary Winston Sweatman. The editor's job seems to consist mostly of correcting dashes and serial commas and asking for favours. However, you will need the support of your department to provide secretarial support—here, the Newsletter has been ably set into TeX by Fiona Richmond—and of your printery to print at cost.

Robert McLachlan
Massey University

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

In the last newsletter we published the names of those who have served on the NZMS council over the past 30 years. David Vere-Jones was the first president and the earlier years feature other names that would be regarded as 'statistical' rather than 'mathematical', including Murray Jorgensen, the current president of the NZSA. Otago and Canterbury Universities both have a Department of Mathematics and Statistics. At some universities the statisticians are in separate departments to the mathematicians, although they may sit within the same school with varying degrees of interaction. Massey University has it both ways: mathematics and statistics are in separate institutes at Palmerston North and together at Albany. In my previous existence at AgResearch I got into repeated trouble for advocating that the mathematicians and statisticians should be grouped together, now that I've left they have merged into the Bioinformatics, Mathematics, and Statistics Section.

I have met representatives of industry who believe that spreadsheets do statistics and nothing else is required—certainly no mathematics. Many research scientists believe that a package gives them all they need: type in your data, run your favourite test and look for a 'p value', the smaller the better. However, if you don't achieve the magic p< 0.05 your result might still be biologically or economically significant, even if it is not statistically significant. (Yes, I was told that more than once. It is, of course, nonsense.) While at AgResearch I was frequently asked what a Durbin-Watson statistic is, because Minitab calculates it when you do a regression. It is a curious attitude: if the computer calculates something it must be useful. At the other extreme, it has also been put to me that statistics is just an applied branch of measure theory, and should be taught in the abstract. I sometimes hear my own work referred to as 'statistical modeling', which is preferable to 'computer modeling' but reflects the misunderstanding of the individual rather than reality. The reality is that the most ardent deterministic modelers in mathematical biology are having to confront probabilistic effects, and that the push of mathematical methods into finance and risk analysis is raising problems couched in terms of stochastic processes. This is not helped by the rule of thumb that if it contains a probability it belongs in a statistics course. There is a growing need for statisticians versed in mathematical methods, and for mathematicians versed in probability theory. To meet this need university mathematics and statistics groups should be growing together and promoting a double major.

My colleague Jeff Hunter is Professor of Statistics and a Fellow of the NZMS. He is to be congratulated on being awarded a DSc by Massey University for his contribution to statistics (but it looks pretty mathematical to me!). Jeff was the chair of the International Workshop on Matrices in Statistics, 2005, held at Albany. At that meeting I chaired the keynote address on 'Coefficients of ergodicity in a matrix setting' presented by the NZMS lecturer, Professor Eugene Seneta of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney. It only takes a glance at the abstract to appreciate the demanding mathematical nature of the talk's content. The NZMS council recognized the contribution of IWMS 2005 to the mathematical life of New Zealand, and agreed to support a speaker.

Another meeting supported by the NZMS was the 2005 Mathematics in Industry Study Group, organized by Graeme Wake at Albany. The society contributed towards the participation of students at the meeting. Out of the seven problems presented by industry this year, two had a significant statistical content. Statisticians do not usually attend the MISG in great numbers, but this year David Scott from Auckland and Ken Russell from Wollongong were present and made a valuable contribution. Both Graeme and Ken have written accounts of the meeting for the NZSA newsletter, see http://nzsa.rsnz.org/Newsletter61/MISG.htm, making a plea for more statisticians to become involved in MISG. Perhaps we are on the verge of a great coming-together.

At the Dunedin colloquium the NZMS speaker was the 2003 winner of the NZMS Research Award, Rod Gover, with a presentation on 'Overdetermined PDEs, the Einstein equations and conformal geometry'. There is a notice about nominations for the 2005 award elsewhere in this issue. At the AGM there was a discussion of the nature of the award—should it become a medal, are the rules appropriate, should there be a more tangible prize? The council will be taking up these questions, so if you have any views or ideas please email them to me. The Aitken Prize for the best student talk at the colloquium was awarded to Joanne Mann of Massey University, Albany, for her presentation 'To vaccinate or not to vaccinate?' A paper by Jo appears elsewhere in this issue. At the colloquium dinner I was pleased to award honorary memberships of the society to four of our colleagues: Marston Conder, Rob Goldblatt, Gillian Thornley and Graeme Wake. In addition to their names featuring frequently in the list of council members published in the last newsletter, they have each contributed much to the NZMS behind the scenes over the years. This is the society's way of expressing it's gratitude.}

Mick Roberts
Massey University, Albany

Mick Roberts
Massey University, Auckland

LOCAL NEWS

AGRESEARCH

With the recent restructuring of AgResearch, three of the mathematical groups have been merged into a new "Bioinformatics, Mathematics, and Statistics" Section consisting of 16 biometricians, five bioinformaticians and five mathematical biologists.

On the conference scene, five of the biometricians went to the Biometrics/Genstat conference at Thredbo in February. David Baird ran a pre-conference workshop on "Design and analysis of microarray studies using GenStat" and gave an invited paper on "The analysis of nuclear magnetic resonance data." Peter Johnstone spoke on "Density estimation from distance sampling using splines" and Lilian Morrison presented on "Immunity to gut nematodes in sheep." Neil Cox and Vanessa Cave were the other two attendees. Being up in the "mountains" it wasn't too hot for the kiwi contingent, but the Queenslanders complained about the cold. Most folk got to climb to the top of the mountain or took the chairlift up and walked down. The wine-tasting competition gave some trouble, and it was decided that tasty was the wrong word for describing cheap (under A$10) wines.

Harold Henderson's work over the last decade with Data Desk graphics has culminated in the publication in JABES (Dec 2004) of a 30-page editor's invited article entitled "Interactive and dynamic graphics in statistical consulting." After a similarly long gestation period, a paper by Graham Wood and Dave Saville on the n-dimensional geometry of the linear model p-value has been published in JRSS-A in Jan 2005 under the obscure title "The ubiquitous angle"; this work could be of interest to teachers of linear algebra who are on the lookout for interesting applications.

Four of the mathematical biologists attended the 41st Applied Mathematics Conference (ANZIAM 2005) in Napier from 30 January to 3 February. Kumar Vetharaniam spoke on "Sampling strategy for DNA backtracing of mixed meat products," Paul Shorten on "A mathematical model of human liver fatty acid metabolism and lipoprotein asssembly" and Ken Louie on "A distributed-delay differential equation model for the growth of ryegrass-clover pastures." Tanya Soboleva was the other attendee. The usual Hawkes Bay sunshine was noticeably absent the entire week, replaced by humid drizzle, although that did not deter a large group from enjoying an adventurous ride out to visit the gannet colony at Cape Kidnappers on the free afternoon.

Rajiv Chaturvedi has joined as a Scientist with the Bioinformatics, Mathematics and Statistics group at AgResearch this January. His research area is development of computational and mathematical methodologies and implementing them in software for computational systems biology problems.

His research at the University of Notre Dame, IN, USA has dealt with modeling morphogenesis [1]. Formation of the structure of an organism or its part encompasses differentiation and growth of tissues and organs during development, starting from undifferentiated mesenchymal cells, under the influence of multiple morphogens, in a complex, dynamically changing spatial domain. The dynamic, three-dimensional, composite model framework to treat vertebrate development combines submodels that address, in a unified framework, length-scales from subcellular to tissues and organs. Interacting submodels he has used include a discrete model derived from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics (Cellular Potts Model) and continuous reaction-diffusion models. A state diagram with associated rules and a set of ordinary differential equations model genetic regulation to define and control cell differentiation. Simulations of spatiotemporal bone patterning in the proximo-distal (from body towards digits) direction of developing avian limb have been carried out as a sample application. The framework has been developed so that future enhancements to refine and add ever more phenomena of interest are allowed (for example, musculature, vasculature, and cytoskeleton modeling).

At AgResearch he is working with Tanya Soboleva on metabolomics of systems of biological interest.

[1] R. Chaturvedi, C. Huang, B. Kazmierczak, T. Schneider, J. A. Izaguirre, T. Glimm, H. G. E. Hentschel, J. A. Glazier, S. A. Newman, M. Alber, "On Multiscale Approaches to Three-Dimensional Modeling of Morphogenesis," Journal of the Royal Society Interface, in press.

Our new Bioinformatics, Mathematics, and Statistics Section had its inaugural annual get-together at Ruakura, Hamilton, from 21 to 23 March, with the middle day spent at the C R Rao workshop.

Ken Louie

THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

Department of Computer Science

Dr Alexei Drummond has accepted an offer of a position as a Lecturer in Bioinformatics. This position is joint between the Bioinformatics Institute and the Department of Computer Science, funded largely by the former.

Dr Nevil Brownlee commenced work as Associate-Professor in February 2004.

Dr Ian Warren commenced work as a Lecturer in April 2004.

Dr Sathiamoorthy Manoharan has been promoted over the bar in the Senior Lecturer Scale, Dr John Hamer has been promoted to Senior Lecturer, Andrew Luxton-Reilly has been promoted over the bar in the Senior Tutor scale, and Dr Burkhard Wuensche has received a special increment in the Lecturer scale.

Dr Richard Lobb took early retirement from his position as Senior Lecturer at the end of February 2004. As a founding member of this Department, Richard made a major contribution to the department and its development over its entire history. Richard took a lead role in the development of the department's curriculum and its computing infrastructure, and he has established the Graphics and Visualisation Research Group as a significant research force in the department. Richard is a Distinguished Teaching Award recipient, and he is well recognized as one of the best teachers and mentors in the department.

Associate-Professor Peter Gibbons took early retirement from his position in August 2004. Peter has also made a major contribution to the department and its development over almost its entire history. Peter served as both Deputy Head of Department and Head of Department for a substantial period of the department's development, and he guided the department through two academic reviews (declining the opportunity to guide the department through a third review this year!). Peter was warmly respected in his leadership roles within the department and faculty, and he is internationally recognized for his work in computational complexity.

Associate-Professor Peter Fenwick has chosen to take early retirement from his position, effective from the beginning of February 2005. Peter was initially appointed as an academic member of the Computer Centre, transferring to the Department of Computer Science in the late 1980s. He has had a major role in developing curricula in Data Communications, and he has a strong international reputation for his work in compression algorithms, including having one of his algorithms implemented in the standard Unix text compression utility. Peter has had many leadership roles in both the department and the Faculty, serving an extended period as Deputy Dean and a year as Acting Head of Department. He has most recently led the department's enrolment team.

Dr Jennifer Lennon retires from her position as Senior Lecturer, effective from the end of February 2005. Jennifer has led the Hypermedia Unit for many years, and she has an international reputation in the area of hypermedia applications for flexible learning. She started in the department as a Senior Tutor, then studied for a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Maurer, becoming the first woman PhD graduate from the department. Jennifer has had an active role in developing the highly-popular graduate Hypermedia course.

The Department would like to take this opportunity to recognise the contributions of Richard, Peter Gibbons, Peter Fenwick and Jennifer to this Department, to the University of Auckland and to Computer Science, and we wish them well in their retirement.

Dr Lew Hitchner completed his one year position as Senior Lecturer in June 2004.

Dr Myra Cohen resigned her position as Senior Tutor in August 2004.

Dr Hans Guesgen has been awarded a U21 Fellowship for 2005. That will allow Hans to visit several Australian and European U21 partner Universities, for benchmarking to assist in development of the department's strategic plan.

IWCIA 2004, the Tenth International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis, was held at the University of Auckland. on December 1st to 3rd. Besides three invited talks, there were 55 accepted papers at IWCIA 2004 (out of 88 submissions for this conference).

Seminars

Professor Rod Downey (VUW), "Generalized Collatz functions and computability".
Mark Moir, "Using elimination to implement scalable FIFO queues."
Jeremy Gibbons, "Enumerating the rationals."

Garry J. Tee

Department of Engineering Science

It is twelve months since your tardy correspondent communicated. During that period Ian Collins has been elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand and Matthias Ehrgott has been promoted to Associate Professor.

In order to make room for the expansion of the Engineering Library, the Department of Engineering Science has moved from the main Engineering building at 20 Symonds Street to 70 Symonds Street (Uniservices House), so it is now reunited with the Bioengineering Institute. We occupy floors 2,3 and 4, with the bioengineers just above us. We are comfortable in refurbished offices with air-conditioning. We have two new computer laboratories and two seminar rooms suitable for Year 4 teaching.

The Department is basking in the glory of being ranked 3rd equal among departments in NZ universities in the Performance Based Research Fund exercise recently held. On the criterion of percentage of staff given an A classification (35%) we rank first. (Six people were ranked as A grade researchers. Their names are confidential, so it could conceivably be a coincidence that following the promotion mentioned above we now have precisely six Professors and Associate Professors.)

Andrew Mason and David Ryan are two of the four founding directors of Optimal Decisions Technologies (ODT), a company that has produced "Siren", a computer program that simulates and co-ordinates the movements of ambulances and trucks.

The Department is getting ready to host the NZIMA Workshop on Mathematical Models for Optimizing Transportation Services (April 18–22).

Don Nield

Department of Mathematics

A Symposium in honour of David Gauld was held on 2004 December 10, with the following lectures:

David Gauld completed his final term of office as Head of Department on 2005 January 31st, after a total of 5079 days, and he was succeeded as HOD by Bill Barton.

Rod Gover has been promoted to Associate Professor; Vivien Kirk, Mike Meylan and Warren Moors have been promoted to Senior Lecturer; and Judy Paterson and Wendy Stratton have been promoted above a bar in the Senior Tutor scale.

Marston Conder has been awarded one of the two inaugural outgoing Hood Fellowships, and at the 2004 New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium (University of Otago) he was elected an Honorary Life Member of the New Zealand Mathematical Society.

Geoff Nicholls has accepted an appointment in the Department of Statistics at Oxford University.

Professor John H. Conway F.R.S., the Distinguished John von Neumann Professor at Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies, visited the Department for January 2005. He was here as one of the participants in the program on "Geometry: Interactions with Algebra and Analysis," which is funded by the NZIMA during the first six months of 2005. He gave lectures on "Geometrical groups in 2 and 3 dimensions,""Hunting the Monster with few weapons," and on "The Free Will Theorem."

Recent visitors include Professor Len Bos (University of Calgary), Professor Sydney Bulman-Fleming (Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo), Professor Michael Eastwood (University of Adelaide), Professor Peter Gill (ANU), Professor Derek Holt (University of Warwick), Professor Patrick DF Ion (Mathematical Reviews), Professor Bill Kantor (University of Oregon), Professor Wolfgang Knapp (Universitaet Tuebingen), Professor Martin Liebeck (Imperial College), Professor Colin Maclachlan (University of Aberdeen), Dr Aisling McCluskey (National University of Ireland, Galway), Professor David Witte Morris & Professor Joy Morris (University of Lethbridge, Alberta), Dr Paul-Andi Nagy (Humboldt University, Berlin), Dr Richard Porter (Bristol University), Professor Cheryl Praeger (UWA), Professor Akos Seress (Ohio State University), Professor Dimitri Shakhmatov (Ehime University, Japan), Professor Andrew Waldron (University of California—Davis), Dr Shanshuang Yang (Emory University) and Dr Tsukasa Yashiro (Osaka University).

The 2004 NZ Mathematics Colloquium was held at the University of Otago on December 6–8. Plenary Addresses were given by Rod Gover on "Overdetermined PDEs, the Einstein equations and conformal geometry," and by James Sneyd on "Neither an ant nor a spider be: historical vignettes in mathematical physiology." Members of this Department gave the following contributed papers:

Bill Barton, Bob Chan & Chris King, "Undergraduate mathematics
learning in English by speakers of other languages."
Marston Conder, "Group actions on hyperbolic manifolds."
David Gauld, "Analytic=Continuous.'
Jeffrey Gong & Gaven Martin, "Extension of quasiconformal homogeneity."
Sina Greenwood, "Brunnian rings."
Michael Meylan, "The vibration of rivetted elastic plates."
Alastair McNaughton, "Optimization of forest harvesting."
Boris Pavlov, "Fitting a solvable model of a Helmholtz resonator."
Steve Taylor, "The temperature in an annealing furnace: an MISG project."
Garry Tee, "Surface area of ellipsoids in n dimensions."

A workshop on geometry was held at The University of Auckland on January 29th, as part of the NZIMA Geometry Program. The speakers were Vaughan Jones, Shanshuang Yang (Emory) on "Uniform Sobolev extension and LLC domains," Michael Eastwood (Adelaide) on "Moduli of isolated hypersurface singularities," Tsukasa Yashiro (Osaka) "On deformations of surface diagrams," and John Conway (Princeton) on "Geometrical groups in 2 & 3 dimensions."

An NZIMA Conference on "Geometry: Interactions with Algebra and Analysis" was held at The University of Auckland, on February 14th–18th. Marston Conder gave a Plenary Address on "Compact hyperbolic 4-manifolds of small volume." Members of this Department contributed the following lectures:

Rod Gover, "Operators on differential forms and global invariants."
Shih-Chang Huang, "Dade's conjecture for the Chevalley groups G₂(q) in defining characteristic."
Primoz Potocnik, "Imprimitive permutation groups with blocks of size two."
Garry Tee, "Surface area and capacity of n-dimensional ellipsoids."

Rick Beatson and Qui Bui (both from Canterbury) and Shayne Waldron ran a conference here in February, on Approximation Theory and Harmonic Analysis. The following lectures were presented:

John J Benedetto (University of Maryland), "Sigma-Delta quantization and finite frames."
Qui Bui (University of Canterbury),"Some remarks on Heisenberg frames."
Len Bos (University of Calgary), "Spanning sets in Lebesgue and Hardy spaces."
,Peter G Casazza (University of Missouri), "Signal reconstruction without noisy phase."
,Xuan Thinh Duong (Macquarie University), "New characterizations of BMO and Morrey-Campanato spaces."
Kil Hyun Kwon (Division of Applied Mathematics, KAIST), "Asymmetric multi-channel sampling and its aliasing error."
,Seng Luan Lee (National University of Singapore), "Approximation of Gaussian and its properties."
Q.T. Le Gia (UNSW), "Polynomial operators and local approximation of solutions of pseudo-differential equations on the unit sphere."
,Paul Leopardi (UNSW), "The Riesz energy of counting measures on the sphere."
,David Levin (Tel Aviv University), "Moving least-squares for surfaces."
Alvise Sommariva (UNSW), "Quadrature over the sphere."
Vilmos Totik (University of Szeged & University of South Florida), "Equilibrium measures and polynomials."
,Janet C Tremain (University of Missouri), "The Kadison-Singer problem and the Feichtinger conjecture."
,Daniel S Zwick (Wilcox Associates), "Some innovations in computing best-fit features in metrology."

The 8th Devonport Topology Festival on February 25th at Devonport was organized by Sina Greenwood, with the following lectures:

Paul Bonnington was invited to give a seminar at Keio University in Japan on February 25th, as part of the Japanese "21st Century COE Program: Integrative Mathematical Sciences." He was at Keio University and Yokohama National University from February 23rd to March 1st.

David Gauld was absent from Auckland from January 21st to February 21st, visiting and working with Dr Abdul Mohamad who is now an Assistant Professor at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. Abdul previously completed his PhD at Auckland supervised by David Gauld & David McIntyre. David Gauld spoke to a general university audience on "The Changing Research Context in New Zealand," and he spoke on "A survey of manifolds" to an audience from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Abdul and David also climbed the highest mountain in the Arabian Peninsula, Jabal Shams, at 3009 metres above sea level.

Greg Oates presented his paper "Measuring the degree of technology use in tertiary mathematics courses" at the 9th Asian Technology Conference in Mathematics, National Institute of Education, Singapore, and he received the Best Paper Award.

Philip Sharp has won a travel grant from the ISAT Linkages Fund, administered by the RSNZ.

Jozef Siran worked with Dr Martin Knor (Slovak University of Technology) and Dr Roman Nedela (Mathematics Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences), financed from the Slovak Research Grant Agency. He has won a travel grant from the ISAT Linkages Fund, administered by the RSNZ.

In 2005 we have four secondary teachers on Study Awards (Margaret Bryant, Lisa Darragh, Suzanne Kerr, Rasela Lafaele); and two secondary teachers on RSNZ Fellowships (Anna Dumnov, Sue Wood). An agreement has been signed with Majlis Amanah Rakyat (MARA) in Malaysia, for a Uniservices contract to provide a 20-week course for 25 mathematics and science teachers.

We have four NZIMA-funded post-doctoral fellows currently with the Department: Primoz Potocnik (ex-Ljubljana), Jana Siagiova (ex-Bratislava), Bart Oldeman, and Richard Evans.

Shirley Huang has successfully defended her thesis for PhD in the oral examination.

Shih-chang Huang has completed the PhD oral examination on his thesis entitled "Dade's conjecture for the Chevalley groups G₂(q) in defining characteristic," supervised by Jianbe An and Eamonn O'Brien. The recommendation from his examiners is that, subject to minor corrections to his thesis, he be awarded the degree of PhD.

The Department had 22 summer students, nine paid by the Department and 13 by the Faculty. A further five students were offered scholarships, but turned them down so they could work elsewhere. Two students who applied for scholarships were instead employed to work on teaching material within the Department. Dr Arkadii Slinko and honours student Robin Christian had a particularly successful summer scholarship project, producing two papers that will be presented at conferences in France and USA.

Simon Marshall has been chosen to represent this university at the Universitas-21 undergraduate research conference in Virginia.

Rachel Joanne Weir graduated here and went in 1995 to the University of Michigan (PhD 2001). She then had an appointment at the University of Virginia. In 2004 Rachel and her husband (Dr Carswell) were both appointed to the Department of Mathematics at Allegheny College, at Meadville in Pennsylvania, where she is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics.

Seminars

Dr Warren Moors, "Separate continuity, joint continuity and the Lindelof property."
Dr Peter MW Gill (ANU), "Introduction to quantum chemistry."
Robin Christian,"On computational complexity of lobbying in multiple referenda."
Professor Dmitri Shakhmatov (Ehime University, Japan),"Constructing Hausdorff topologies on Abelian groups" (2 lectures).
Professor Derek Holt (University of Warwick),"Groups with regular sets of geodesics," and"Formal language theory and the word problem in groups."
Dr Paul-Andi Nagy (Humboldt University of Berlin), "Nearly-Kaehler manifolds."
Professor John Butcher, "General linear methods."
Renu Choudhary, "Some topics from the theory of monotone
operators and nonlinear semigroups," and"Generic convergence of a convex Lyapounov function along
trajectories of nonexpansive semigroups in Hilbert space."
Professor Richard Porter (University of Bristol),"Wave scattering by an ice sheet of varying thickness."
Professor Wolfgang Knapp (Universitaet Tuebingen),"Primality testing with the group SL(2,Z/nZ)".
Professor Bill Kantor (University of Oregon),"Algorithms for Sylow subgroups" (4 lectures).
Dr Garth Gaudry & Jan Thomas (Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute),"The AMSI and the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics."

Garry J. Tee}
Department of Statistics

Our biggest news has been the richly deserved promotions of Alan Lee and Chris Triggs as professors in the department. We are still, of course, reluctant to let their predecessor Alastair Scott retire completely. In a last-ditch effort to keep him, the university bureaucracy stepped in and lost his retirement notice, with the happy consequence that he remains with us for another month!

Our PhD students have been exceptionally busy recently. Monique Mackenzie (now at St Andrews University) and Andreas Berg successfully defended their theses, and Yuichi Hirose submitted his, all within the space of a week. Sarah Song was awarded an NZ International Postgraduate Research Scholarship for her PhD with Mik Black and Yong Wang. As if all this wasn't enough, James Reilly and Mat Pawley are both the proud new fathers of baby girls, and Andreas Berg is a proud expectant father.

Mik Black attended the ANU BioInfoSummer meeting and the Otago Genomics Facility Microarray Meeting, as well as the International Conference on Bioinformatics here in Auckland in September. Ilze Ziedins was an invited participant to a month-long programme on Queueing Theory at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, in November.

Before the summer break, staff and grad students wound down by challenging each other to a Paintball match. After two hours of fierce warfare it was looking like stalemate, until Brian McArdle launched an heroic sting raid and captured the enemy flag, with the invaluable assistance of the Marti Anderson Getaway Outfit. Better luck to the students for next time, but the staff are quietly confident (read "gloating furiously") for another victory next year!

A workshop on Bayesian inference and MCMC, organized by Renate Meyer, was held here on February 24th. The speakers were:

Quentin Atkinson, "Bayesian inference for language phylogenies."
Mik Black, "Estimating disease prevalence in the absence of a gold standard."
Bill Bolstad, "A Monte-Carlo analysis of a mixture-based shrinkage estimator."
Colin Fox, "Solving Inverse Problems using MCMC with an approximation."
Ville Kolehmainen, "Parallelized Bayesian Inversion for three-dimensional dental X-ray imaging."
Renate Meyer, "Bayesian semiparametric modelling of stratified survival data using mixtures."
Russell Millar, "A simple case-deletion diagnostic for Bayesian models."
Geoff Nicholls, "Deposition model-comparison from radiocarbon data."
Allen Rodrigo, Angelika van der Linde,"Coefficients of determination and predictive model choice."
Tim Watson, "A hierarchical Bayesian model and simulation software for the maintenance of water pipe networks."

The 14th International Workshop on Matrices and Statistics IWMS-2005 was held at Massey University—Albany from March 29th to March 1st. George Seber gave a Keynote Lecture on "Things my mother never told me about Matrices," Alan Lee & Alastair Scott gave an Invited Lecture on "Semi-parametric efficiency, projection and the Scott-Wild estimator," and Garry Tee gave an Invited Lecture on "Eigenvectors of block circulant matrices."

And finally, our departmental manager Sharon Walker found herself fielding more than the usual workload in March. As she walked out of the building, a giant 2kg bunya nut fell from an Araucaria tree and missed her by millimetres. She paused to inspect that UFO, whereupon she was narrowly missed by a second one! The department is looking into alternative ways of expressing our appreciation for Sharon.

Seminars

Dr Peter MW Gill (ANU), "Efficient calculation of p values in permutation significance tests."
Professor CR Rao F.R.S. (Pennsylvania State University, NZSA Visiting Lecturer 2005),"Statistics: reflections on the past and visions for the future."
Dr Angelika van der Linde (University of Bremen),"General measures of variability and dependence for multivariate continuous distributions."

Garry J. Tee

UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Norhayati Hamzah has completed all the requirements for her PhD following her oral examination in mid-December. Her PhD thesis was entitled "A bifurcation analysis of a multi-compartment plankton-zooplankton-nutrient interaction" and was supervised by (now Adjunct-) Professor Graeme Wake and Dr Alex Ross (ex-NIWA). Yati is now back in her home University in Brunei Darussalam as a Lecturer in Mathematics.

Douglas Bridges gave a lecture in March at the Special Session on Proof Theory and Constructivity, at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Symbolic Logic, in Stanford. He and Simona Vita then visited several universities in Texas and New Mexico, lecturing on their joint work on apartness spaces. Mike Steel is heading off in April to the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) at Berkeley where he will present some results from his just-completed MacLaurin Fellowship. The workshop is titled "Models of Real World Random Networks". Ben Martin gave a talk at the Oberwolfach meeting "Groups and Geometries" in March. Thirteen people from the department, including three students, went to the NZMS Mathematics Colloquium in Dunedin in December, giving eleven talks between them.

Recent visitors include: Professor Claude Bélisle (Laval University), Professor Jotun Hein (Oxford), Dr Anne-Mette Hein (Imperial College), Professor Greg Reid (University of Western Ontario), Professor Hajime Ishihara (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Professor Vincent Moulton (University of East Anglia), Dr Katharina Huber (University of East Anglia), Dr Burkhard Polster (Monash University)

Seminars

Norhayati Hamzah, "A bifurcation analysis of a multi-compartment plankton-zooplankton-nutrient interaction."
Professor Martin Liebeck (Imperial College), "Random walks on finite groups."
Professor Benny Chor (Tel Aviv University), "Maximum likelihood of evolutionary trees is hard."
Professor Jasbir Chahal (Brigham Young University), "Congruent numbers and elliptic curves."
Professor Marcel Herzog (Tel Aviv University), "Characterization of non-nilpotent groups with two irreducible character degrees."
Dr Günter Steinke, "Old and new on Laguerre geometries."
Professor Jotun Hein (University of Oxford), "Finding the minimal number of recombinations for a set of sequences from a population."
Professor Angelika van der Linde (University of Bremen), "Model complexity."
Professor Claude Belisle (Laval University), "Aspects of directional sampling on ."

Ben Martin

MASSEY UNIVERSITY

Institute of Fundamental Sciences (Palmerston North)

Mathematics

We welcome Aroon Parshotam who has been appointed as a lecturer for one year. This appointment arose as Robert McLachlan has taken up his MacLaurin Fellowship from the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications this year.

We said farewell to Tom Lofaro who went back home to Missouri and welcomed back Bob Richardson from North Carolina.

Our congratulations to Gillian Thornley who has been awarded an honorary membership of the New Zealand Mathematical Society.

Also our congratulations to Kee Teo who won the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching First Year Students. Well deserved!

John Hudson attended the Summer Workshop on "Geometry: Interactions with algebra and analysis" held in Napier, January 8–15, 2005.

Bruce van-Brunt, Igor Boglaev, Aroon Parshotam, Dean Halford, Robert McLachlan and Marijcke Vlieg went to Napier to attend the 41st Australia New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ANZIAM2005) Conference held from 31 January to 3 February noon. The conference was very well attended by both countries (140) and there were about 120 talks and these were of high standard. Robert McLachlan was an invited speaker and talked about 'Geometric Numerical Integration.' Igor, Aroon and Bruce presented a paper.

Seminars

Professor Tianming Wang (Department of Mathematics, Dalian University of Technology, People's Republic of China), "Algorithmic proofs of combinatorial identities."
Professor Ian Enting (The University of Melbourne), "Forty years of CO₂ inversions: What have we learned."
Professor Gaven Martin, "The equations of nonlinear elasticity, conformal geometry and the Hilbert-Smith conjecture."

Marijcke Vlieg-Hulstman

Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences (Albany)

The year had a busy start with the MISG at Albany and the meetings at Napier.

The ANZIAM Mathematics-in-Industry Study Group for 2005 was hosted by the Centre for Mathematics in Industry at Massey University (Albany) on 24th–28th January, just before ANZIAM2005 in Napier. 120 delegates from 13 countries participated and 7 industries presented problems for analysis, and hopefully, practical solutions. Six of these problems were from New Zealand industries (Lincoln Ventures, NZ Steel, Transpower, Environment Canterbury, Compac Sorting Equipment, and Fisher and Paykel), and one was from Australia (Backyard Technology). On the first day an opening address was given by invitation by the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, Dr Michael Cullen, which was very widely reported. Dr Suki Siriwardene, Manager of Technology New Zealand, then broke the good news to the workshop that her organisation was supporting this venture under their "SmartStart" program. A student workshop was held within MISG2005. Dr Sam Howison, Director of OCIAM, University of Oxford, who was a special invited facilitator, spoke at this and also gave a separate plenary lecture. DVDs of all the main Monday (Problems) and Friday (Solutions) sessions are available for purchase. (See notice elsewhere in this Newsletter). The Director of MISG2005 (Professor Graeme Wake) and Massey's Centre have agreed to host the MISG2006, in a similar pattern. (See elsewhere.) An informal dinner was enjoyed by delegates at the adjacent North Harbour Stadium complex, but we could not arrange for a Trans-Tasman rugby test to be played that night, regrettably!! The Proceedings of MISG2004 are in press and are eagerly awaited, judging from the number of inquiries.

The Mathematicians were highly involved in both meetings at Napier at the start of the year.

Gaven Martin organised (with E. O'Brien) the 11th annual NZMRI summer meeting in Napier on the topic "Interaction between Analysis and Geometry". Shaun Cooper and Uros Abas were other participants from IIMS.

Robert, Graeme, Mick, Carlo, Winston, Jo and Amanda all attended ANZIAM in Napier at the start of February. We enjoyed a great week despite the rain. Robert continues as President of ANZIAM and Carlo took on his new role as chairperson of the New Zealand Branch of ANZIAM. Looking back to the end of last year, December saw many of the Albany Mathematicians at the NZMS Colloquium at University of Otago: Robert, Graeme, Mick, Carlo, Winston, Mini, Jo and Frederick. We congratulate Jo Mann on winning the Aitken Prize for the best student presentation "To vaccinate or not to vaccinate" and also Heung Yeung (Frederick) Lam, who receive one of two honourable mentions for his talk "Sums of two squares and a conjecture for sums of 8t squares". Graeme Wake was awarded an Honorary Membership of the NZMS. At the meeting Gaven became incoming Vice President of the NZMS, Winston became Secretary, Mick continues as President.

The week before the colloquium, Winston and Carlo participated in the NZIMA workshop on scientific computation, bifurcation theory and geometric mechanics in Leigh.

In November, Leng Leng Lim travelled to the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earths Interior 2004 (IAVCEI) General Assembly meeting at Puc\={U}n, Chile. She presented some of her research done with Robert McKibbin and Winston Sweatman in a talk "Modelling volcanic ashfall". She also visited Villarrica, one of the most active volcanoes in Chile. One other unforgettable moment for her was having her birthday song sung in Spanish at the conference dinner by over nine hundred people from all around the world. She says that she was very touched although she could not understand a single word of it.

Dr Alona Ben-Tal has taken up her Lectureship in Mathematics. Alona has just completed a three year period as a NZ S&T Postdoc Fellow with the Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland, where she studied the cardio-respiratory system.

Sharleen Harper and Amanda Elvin have started their PhD projects. Sharleen is studying Aerosol Transport with Graeme Wake and Robert McKibbin. Amanda is studying Computational Neuroscience with supervisors Carlo Laing and Mick Roberts.

Congratulations to Cynthia Wang who has successfully defended her PhD thesis. Cynthia is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, working with Dr Lutz Gross (previously of IIMS). Visitors}

Geoff Mercer from the University of New South Wales (ADFA in Canberra).
Colin Maclachlan from the University of Aberdeen.
Henning Rasmussen from the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
Sam Howison from the University of Oxford, England.
Patrick Ion from Mathematical Reviews.
Heng Huat Chan from the National University of Singapore.

Seminars

Jon Chapman (University of Oxford, England),"Exponential asymptotics and nonlinear eigenvalue problems."
Martin Reimann (University of Bern, Switzerland),"Wavelets for hearing and an uncertainty relation for the affine group."
Carlo Laing, "Equation-free modelling: some neural examples."
Heng Huat Chan (National University of Singapore), "When is a prime a sum of two squares?"
Henning Rasmussen (University of Western Ontario, Canada),"Swing Options in Financial Mathematics."
Shaun Cooper,"Introduction to the Macdonald identities."
Sam Howison (University of Oxford, England),"Mathematics of splashing and water entry."

Winston Sweatman

Institute of Information Sciences and Technology (Palmerston North)

Steve Haslett has again been traveling to strange and unfamiliar territories, most recently Vietnam and Azerbaijan on a World Bank project involving small national surveys of water and sanitation providers. The project plan is to use these studies to set up a toolkit which will be a template for future surveys in other countries. He reports that the local cuisine was excellent in both cases. He has now returned to yet another strange and unfamiliar territory: first year teaching.

Steve and Geoff Jones are also completing a project for the World Bank and the National Statistical Coordination Board of the Philippines, producing small-area estimates of poverty incidence for the Philippines for use in aid targeting. They spent part of last year in Manila working with NSCB staff. The food was quite good here too, but the national habit of snacking every two hours was difficult to keep up with.

Doug Stirling recently won a Massey Teaching Excellence Award for his web-based teaching software CAST. He is currently working on a Rockefeller Foundation-funded project to develop a version of CAST for Africa and will be on sabbatical at the University of Reading from June until January adding chapters about multiple regression and multivariate analysis. He has been invited to run a Workshop at the Applied Statistics 2005 conference in September in Slovenia.

In February Ganesh and Geoff Jones attended and presented papers at the Regional Biometrics Society Conference in Thredbo, Australia. They made up half of the "Palmy Pirates" team who astonished everyone by coming from nowhere to take third place in the Thredbo Challenge (see attached photograph).

This is perhaps the first Local News in which it is not reported that Mark Bebbington has been overseas. He has however been promoted to Associate Professor, for which we congratulate him.

Ganesalingam has now almost recovered from the physical effects of the tsunami in which he and his family were caught while holidaying in Sri Lanka just prior to the International Sri Lankan Statistical Conference in December. He would like to thank the many well-wishers who contacted him.

David Alexander, having just achieved his doctorate, has now achieved parenthood as well, being the proud father of Daniel (7lb 8 0z). He is currently on parental leave. The switch from first year teaching to changing nappies has no doubt been traumatic.

Although still working at Landcare, Greg Arnold is reducing still further, to 20%, his involvement in the university, confirming the old adage that"old statisticians never retire, they just tend to zero (almost surely)".

Geoff Jones

UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

We are pleased to welcome several new staff members and a continuing appointment.

Prof Mark Meerschaert of the University of Reno, Nevada, has taken up his position as Chair of Applied Mathematics in February. He is featured in the "New Colleagues" section.

Dr Amal Amleh has continued her Fixed Term position as Lecturer in Computational Modelling from February 2005 for a further year.

Dr Richard Martin, of Wirksworth, U.K, has been appointed to the position of Fixed Term Statistics Lectureship while Assoc Prof Richard Barker is on study leave this year.

Mr Chris Palmer has been appointed as Computer Programmer/Support Person from mid-December 2004.

Dr Robert Aldred attended the 2004 NZIMA Conference on Combinatorics and Its Applications combined with 29th Austrasian Conference on Combinatorics and presented a paper and Poster in Taupo 13–18 December last year. The meeting was well attended with twenty invited speakers representing some of the biggest names in Graph Theory worldwide. Apart from the talks which were of a very high standard, Robert was able to discuss several current projects with international collaborators

John Clark attended the International Workshop on Algebra (VIC 2005) in February at Victoria University of Wellington and gave an invited talk entitled "Locally semi-T-nilpotent families of modules."

Mr John Harraway has just returned from six weeks in Brazil. He presented an invited paper at the 9th Brazilian Regression Conference in Sao Pedro. He also gave seminars in the Department of Exact Sciences at the University in Piracicaba and the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sao Paulo. He visited Dalton Andrade at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianopolis for collaborative work on item response theory and the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, the city where ICOTS7 (International Conference on Teaching Statistics 7) will be held in July 2006. John is Scientific Secretary for ICOTS7 and while in Brazil he had meetings with the Local Organising Committee in Sao Paulo and meetings in Salvador at the venue for ICOTS7 as well as with others involved with the conference next year. John was recently elected a Vice President of the International Association for Statistical Education.

Visitors

Russell Higgs, from University College Dublin, has been visiting the Department for three months with his PhD student Donal Healy. Russell won this period of leave as part of a President's Teaching Award and chose to come to Otago to savour the Dunedin weather (well it is as least as good as Dublin's!) and to work with John Curran and Dennis McCaughan. Russell's interest is in projective representations which has some connections with central automorphisms.

In March Yonas Gebeyehu Tesfaye visited the University of Otago to work with his PhD thesis advisor Mark Meerschaert, Chair of Applied Mathematics. Yonas is a graduate student in Hydrological Sciences at the University of Nevada, Professor Meerschaert's previous post. Yonas's research concerns statistical models of river flows that take into account the seasonal variability in covariance structure, and the heavy tailed nature of river flows. Mathematically, "heavy tails" means that the probability of exceeding a threshold R falls off like a power of R, and practically this means that observations several times larger than the mean are common. Yonas expects to defend his PhD thesis at the University of Nevada in May 2005. He enjoyed leaving the Nevada snow and desert to spend a few weeks in the beautiful green surroundings of Dunedin. He also reports that the coffee here is much better, and being Ethiopian, he is an expert in that area.

Seminars

Professor Richard Porter (University of Bristol), "Wave scattering by ice sheets of varying thickness."
Professor Jasbir Chahal (Brigham Young University), "Congruent numbers and elliptic curves."
Rick Beatson (University of Canterbury), "Interpolations and approximation with radial basis functions and applications."

New Zealand Statistical Association Visiting Lecturer for 2005

C R Rao (Eberly Professor Emeritus of Statistics, Pennsylvania State University, USA), "Cross Examination of Data."
Dr Russell Higgs (University College Dublin), "An Introduction to Projective Representations of Finite Groups."
Peter Fenton, "Life of Pi."
Angelika van der Linde (University of Bremen, Germany), "Model complexity."

Lenette Grant

THE UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO}

Department of Mathematics}

In the latest promotion round, Rua Murray was promoted to Senior Lecturer and Stephen Joe was promoted to Associate Professor. Congratulations to them both.

The majority of the department is recovering from running the ANZIAM2005 conference held in Napier. Alfred Sneyd, Tim Stokes, Rua, Sean Oughton, and Stephen were on the organizing committee. Other people to attend from the department were Ian Craig, two postdocs, and four postgraduate students.

Participants at other conferences were Kevin Broughan and Rua who attended the "Geometry: Interactions with Algebra and Analysis" meeting held in Napier at the start of the year.

After the ANZIAM2005 conference, we had a number of short term visitors. These included the former post-docs Jacob Heerikhuisen, Jonathan Kress, and Paul Watson. Also visiting was James Lyness from Argonne National Laboratory.

Ernie Kalnins is now back from study leave in the United States. In turn, Stephen is currently on study leave visiting the University of New South Wales until mid-June. The other person on study leave in the first half of the year is Sean. He will start the overseas leg of his leave in early April. He will spend about a month in the United States, followed by about six weeks in Wales, after which he will attend a conference in Canada.

Stephen Joe

Department of Statistics}

Greetings from the Waikato. It has been a while since I have contributed to the Mathematical Society newsletter and there has been much happening, so forgive me in advance for any errors and omissions.

In April of 2004, the department hosted a successful workshop by Professor Peter Green of the University of Bristol, entitled"Structure and uncertainty: statistical modelling, stochastic systems and Bayesian computation." In March 2005, we presented another one day workshop, entitled "Data Scrutiny and Data Mining". The presenter was the NZSA Visiting Lecturer, Professor C R Rao from Penn State University, USA. Professor Rao, is one of the most eminent statisticians in the world, with a biography that lists two pages of medals, high level appointments, awards, publications and qualifications, spanning six decades. Anyone who has studied statistics will have come across his name. Technical terms such as Cramer-Rao inequality, Rao's Score Test, the Fisher-Rao Theorem and Rao distance appear in all standard books on statistics.

Last year saw the successful defense and graduation of our two PhD students Carole Wright and Khangelani Zuma. Carole's thesis was entitled "Variety Trials in 2-dimensional layouts" and Khange's thesis was "Sexual Network Random Effects Model of Migration and Spread of HIV and other STIs in South Africa". Congratulations also go to Bill Bolstad for the successful launch of his book"Introduction to Bayesian Statistics" which was released in April, 2004.

On the visitor front, we again enjoyed a visit from Ken Russell and also Dave Johnson from Loughborough. Dave was with us for all of the second semester. He was involved with some teaching in our department, but he was here primarily to work with Nye John and David Whitaker on the revisions for the second edition of their book "Statistical Thinking for Managers" which is currently with the publishers.

Now, for a little on the "comings and goings" of members of our department. Lyn Hunt was on leave for the second half of 2004. During this time, she visited Melbourne and also Brisbane, where she was working with Kay Basford. Murray Jorgensen went to the United States in October, where he presented papers in Chicago and also at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins. Nye John and Dave Whitaker attended IBC in Cairns in July and Dave was also a participant at the NZORS conference held in Auckland in November. In May, James Curran went to Vienna where he attended the R conference. He also attended the Bruce Weir Symposium in Raleigh North Carolina and was an invited speaker at the NCSU Summer School Statistics Genetics also in Raleigh. In June James went to the JBRC Workshop on Identification in Edinburgh and was on leave for the rest of the year to work in Birmingham for the Forensic Science Service. In December, Bill Bolstad went to the 3rd Winter Workshop on Statistics and Computer Science - Scientific Application of Bayesian Analysis in Ein Gedi, Israel. Bill also attended the NZSA conference in Wellington in July 2004, along with Judi McWhirter and Murray Jorgensen. At the AGM, held during the conference, Murray was elected President of the Society and Judi was elected Secretary.

Finally, Dave Whitaker is currently on Sabbatical Leave and in his absence, Nye is acting Chairperson of the department.

Seminars

Jan Bulla (Goettingen University, Germany), "Introduction to Hidden Markov Models."
Angelika van der Linde (University of Bremen, Germany), "General measures of variability and dependence for multivariate continuous distributions."
Rosemary Bailey (Queen Mary University of London), "Hasse diagrams to describe the structure of designed experiments."
Jacques Poot (Population Studies Centre, University of Waikato), "On the use of meta-analysis in economics."
Nye John, "Inverse of the Information Matrix."
David Johnson (Business School, Loughborough University), "Teaching
Statistics with Microsoft Excel."
Peter Davis (Department of Sociology, The University of Auckland), "Social facts and social stats: applications in quantitative sociology."
James Curran, "Some issues surrounding the interpretation of Low Copy Number (LCN) DNA evidence."
Murray Jorgensen, "Estimating a density of microbial densities."
Harold Henderson (Statistics, AgResearch Ruakura),"Henderson-Dynamic Graphics in Statistical Consulting."
David Ryan (Department of Engineering Science, The University of Auckland), "Robustness Issues in Aircrew Tours of Duty Optimisation."
Ray Hoare (Hoare Research Software Ltd, Hamilton), "Why do we need ANOTHER statistics program?"

Judi McWhirter

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON}

School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computing Sciences Te Kura Tatau

There is to be a review of our mathematics, statistics and operations research academic programmes in August this year, so we are busy preparing self-reviews as part of this process.

Peter Donelan was an invited speaker at the Applications of Singularities workshop at CIRM (Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques) in February, speaking on Singularities in Robotics.

Guohua Wu will be leaving us in April for a (tenure-track) lectureship at Nangyang Technological University, Singapore.

Mark McGuinness has once again spent several months as a Visiting Foreign Professor at the Applied Mathematics Division of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Taejon over Christmas, coming back for the Mathematics in Industry Study Group held at Massey University in Albany at the end of January. Mark is also visiting Andrew Fowler in Oxford for three weeks in April this year, working on models of cardiac control.

On the 28th and 29th of January 2005, MSCS hosted a two-day workshop on general relativity (Einstein's theory of gravity). New Zealand contains two active research groups in general relativity, once centered on Dr Matt Visser at Victoria University, and the other centered on Dr David Wiltshire at Canterbury University. For these two days both groups got together in Wellington for a series of thirteen informal seminars describing ongoing research.

Topics covered included cosmology, black holes, relativistic stellar structure and horizons. If you would like to find out more about the Victoria University General Relativity Research Group, or about one of the seminars given, please visit the Gravity Group homepage or contact the MSCS School office.

Seminars Given at the Gravity Workshop:}

Matt Visser, "Effective refractive index tensor for weak-field gravity."
Joey Medved, "Bekenstein-Hawking entropy confronts the generalized uncertainty principle."
Silke Weinfurtner, "Analogue quantum gravity phenomenology from a 2 phase BEC."
Celine Cattoen "Necessary and sufficient conditions for bangs, bounces, crunches, rips, sudden singularities, and more."
Petarpa Boonserm, "Generalizing and classifying perfect fluid spheres."
Piyush Jain, "Application of the classical field method to acoustic black holes in Bose-Einstein condensates."
David Wiltshire, "Accelerating cosmologies from compactification with a twist."
Roy Kerr, "Killing's equations for lazy students."
Benedict Carter, "Thermodynamic geometry for black holes."
Ben Leith, "Supercomputers, uniqueness and multi-scalar black holes."
Ishwaree Neupane, "Cosmology as Geodesic Motion: Multiple Scalars."
Alex Nielsen, "Random stuff about black hole horizons."
Marni Sheppeard, "From $M$-theory to tricategories—some current developments."

The Master of Science Degree in Stochastic Processes in Finance and Insurance is being offered by MSCS, for the first time, in 2005. Overseas specialists will be invited to lead courses, and representatives from the finance industry will be called in to help guide students through their projects. There is also a twinning arrangement with Tilburg University, so that students may be able to undertake some of their studies in the Netherlands.

Readers interested in finding out further information are encouraged to check out the programme website, or contact the director of the programme, Professor Estate Khmaladze.

Professor John Hine took up the position of Head of School on Wednesday 1 December. John has been Deputy Head for the last three years and some time prior to that was Chairperson of the former Department of Computer Science.

John joined Victoria University in 1977 after completing a Master of Science degree and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin in the United States. He led the team that introduced the Internet to New Zealand at the start of 1986. The model of providing Internet access as a service made Victoria's then Computer Science Department the first Internet Service Provider (ISP) in New Zealand and eventually led to the establishment of NetLink, a University-owned ISP, in 1997.

John's research interests involve many facets of distributed systems, and his research has led to a role in the development of an Advanced Network for Research and Education for New Zealand. He has served on several Ministry of Research, Science & Technology working groups related to the development of this network and is now leading the capability development in anticipation of its implementation in 2005. He has also been spearheading the development of grid computing facilities at Victoria, including establishing an Access Grid node ({\tt http://www.accessgrid.org}) and a distributed grid of desktop computers for large-scale computing.

John replaces Dr Peter Donelan who has completed his term as Head of School. Peter summarised his term as Head of School as follows:

Three years as Head of School seem to have gone by in a flash. There have been plenty of good moments and achievements, some good ideas that haven't yet come to fruition and maybe some missed opportunities.

Some of the achievements include: a very pleasing PBRF ranking for all the school's disciplines; ongoing success in Marsden; getting the BIT bedded in; some outstanding theses from Masters and PhD students, and lots more in progress; a superb office staff providing splendid service to the School; a computer network that demonstrates best practice that works!; numerous excellent workshops and conferences; expanding links with industry; an attractive website with well-designed functionality; and the growth and success of applied statistics.

Although as individuals we sometimes have different views about aspects of what we do and why, I have always felt genuine support from colleagues and a collective desire to achieve the best in the circumstances we are in. The School Executive Committee has provided advice and contributed to decisions on a wide range of matters affecting us. In particular, John Hine has provided a sounding board for ideas and applied clear-sighted advice and judgment without which I would not have been able to carry out the role. I wish him all the best for the next three years and I am confident the School will continue to flourish.

Congratulations to Yinhuo Zhang and Matt Visser who have been recently promoted.

Current news from the Stats/OR group}

(Thanks to John Haywood for this report): Megan Clark has been on Research and Study (R&S) leave since September 2004. Now back in Wellington, but still on leave until the end of April 2005, Megan visited Memorial University of Newfoundland and McMaster University in Hamilton (both Canada), London South Bank University (UK) and Freie Universitat Berlin (Germany). Thus Megan replaced most of Wellington's summer by winter elsewhere, although before Christmas that wasn't too bad a swap!

John Haywood had quite a short period of R&S leave from October 2004 to January 2005, but spent the time in Wellington and, among other things, that meant he got to enjoy Helen Haywood's 2nd birthday party early in December. John presented a paper at the NZ Econometrics Study Group 2005 summer meeting in Christchurch, 11–12 March.

Stefanka Chukova has R&S leave from December 2004 to June 2005. Stefanka is visiting colleagues in the US at University of North Carolina, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), General Motors R&D Center (Michigan) and Kettering University, before attending a conference in Bulgaria. An important event that occurred early in Stefanka's leave was the birth of her first grandson Kian, who was born with no problems on 14 December 2004. We all hope Kian's first few months have gone smoothly, and are looking forward to a lengthy update on his progress when Stefanka returns. Before her R&S leave Stefanka went to a conference in Hiroshima, Japan in late August 2004. When Stefanka does return to NZ, she'll have quite a heavy landing, since she'll be taking over immediately as Program Director for Stats and OR from Shirley Pledger, who has been in that role since Megan started her leave.

Surprisingly(?), Shirley is showing no signs of a love of the power that comes with the job, and in fact seems even more keen than the rest of us for Stefanka to return! Shirley recently presented a paper at the February 2005 Thredbo Conference of the Australasian Region of the International Biometric Society. While there (which is quite "close" to Canberra), Shirley went up Mt Kosciuszko, a high point (literally and metaphorically) in Kosciuszko National Park. Those familiar with Mt Kosciuszko will note that I wrote "went up", rather than "climbed".

Also in February 2005, Richard Arnold attended COBAL2—the Second Meeting of the Bayesian Society of Latin America—held in the Baja California in Mexico. Richard presented a poster on determining tectonic stress using earthquake data. Dong Wang was away from December 2004 to early February 2005, working at RMIT (Australia) and also attending conferences in Sri Lanka and Australia.

Ivy Liu has R&S leave from November 2004 to June 2005. Ivy was initially based in the US at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. However Ivy was planning to move around a bit during 2005, before returning to VUW for the last month or so of her leave.

Estate Khmaladze was away for January 2005 and a couple of (separate) weeks in February. Estate presented papers at the International Conference on the Future of Statistical Theory, Practice and Education (Hyderabad, India), the Annual all-Indian Conference in Probability Theory, the Second Bachelier Colloquium on Stochastic Calculus and Finance, in honour of Albert Shiryaev's 70th birthday (Metabief, France), and the NZIMA international conference on Geometry: Interactions with Algebra and Analysis (Auckland). Estate was especially disappointed that this last conference coincided with our enrollment in person week, so he didn't get the chance to sign lots of students into our first year papers. At least, I think he said he was disappointed, but it's possible I misheard.

We were pleased to host Professor Guennady Martynov from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, who visited Estate Khmaladze from early February to late March. Professor Martynov is a well known specialist in the area of goodness-of-fit theory, and in the theory of Cramer-von Mises tests in particular. While at VUW, Prof Martynov worked on the development of a web page dedicated to goodness-of-fit theory and the online implementation of modern testing methods. He also gave a seminar while at VUW, on new results for Cramer-von Mises goodness-of-fit tests.

The group is excitedly looking forward to the arrival of two new staff around the middle of the year; an Operations Research lecturer and a Consulting Statistician. There'll be more details on these appointments later. Finally, while Stefanka is on leave we are very grateful that Prof Moshe Haviv is visiting us from the Department of Statistics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for the first half of 2005. Moshe is taking half of two of our Operations Research courses between March and June in Stefanka's place, and we're very pleased to have him on board.

Wellington Statistics Group

The Wellington Statistics Group (WSG), a local group of the New Zealand Statistics Association, continues to meet regularly. Attendance at the early evening meetings remains pretty good (typically 20 to 30 people, sometimes more) and the evenings often continue with up to a dozen or so people dining together. Since the WSG-organised NZSA Conference on 1 July 2004 in Wellington, in reverse chronological order there have been WSG talks given by:

Tim Ball, Statistical Consulting for Continuous Improvement, February 2005: "Golden Opportunities—A Case Study."
Estate Khmaladze, VUW, December 2004: "Probability and Statistics in Tbilisi, Georgia in retrospect: 1963-1983."
Robin Willink, (Applied Mathematics) Industrial Research Ltd, November 2004: "Statistical methods in metrology (measurement science)."
Robert Davies, Statistics Research Associates Ltd, September 2004: "Crash Risk and Road Surface Characteristics."

The eminent statistician Professor CR Rao also spoke in Wellington, to a large audience, on 17 March 2005 during his NZ tour.

Details of the NZSA 2004 Conference programme (plus abstracts, etc) can be found at: http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/events/NZSA2004/.

Preceding the NZSA conference, WSG heard talks by:

Jeff Robinson, General Motors R&D Center, Michigan USA, May 2004:"Estimating Mean Functions from Warranty Data with Dual Useage Measures."
James Liu, VUW, April 2004: "Dynamics of interpersonal political environment and party identification: longitudinal studies of voting in Japan and NZ."
Shirley Pledger, VUW, March 2004: "Using finite mixtures to model heterogeneity in capture-recapture models."

The next WSG meeting will be on 13 April 2005, addressed by Mark Weatherall from Wellington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, on "Graphical sensitivity analysis with different methods of imputation for a trial with probable non-ignorable missing data."

Anyone who does not presently receive WSG announcements and who wishes to be informed of future events is welcome to contact the WSG Convenor, John Haywood: John.Haywood@mcs.vuw.ac.nz.

Seminars

Martin Bridson (Imperial college, London; Forder Lecturer), "Isomorphism, Conjugacy, and the Grammar of Combings."
Martin Bridson (Imperial College London; Forder Lecturer), "The language of symmetry and the grammar of space."
Martin Bridson (Imperial college, London; Forder Lecturer), "Curvature and decidability in geometry and group theory."
Nevil Brownlee (Computer Science, The University of Auckland and CAIDA, UC San Diego), "Internet Flows and Streams: Observations with NeTraMet."
Neal Glew (Intel), "Typed STIR: Experiences with Type Checking the IR of an Optimising Java JIT."
S. Ejaz Ahmed (Head of Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Windsor, Canada), "Simultaneous Quantiles Estimation under Right Censoring and Left Truncation."
C.R.~Rao, "Cross Examination of Data."
Mark Moir (Sun Microsystems), "Using Elimination to Implement Scalable FIFO Queues."
Angelika van der Linde (University of Bremen), "Model complexity."
Sam Howison (Oxford University), "Models for splashing and water entry."
Guennadi Martynov (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow), "New results for Cramér-von Mises goodness of fit tests."
Jasbir Chahal (Brigham Young University), "Congruent numbers and elliptic curves."
Mary Poppendieck, "Lean Software Development."
Marcos Nunes-Ueno (Microsoft Game Studios), "Usability and Games."
Dean Pemberton, "Internet Background Radiation."
Frank Stephan, "Which structures are automatic?"
Angela Martin, "The Role of Customers on Extreme Programming Projects."
Peter Komisarczuk, "Wireless Virtual Organizations."
Angelika van der Linde (University of Bremen), "Model complexity."

Mark McGuiness

Continued

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