Number 84     April 2002

NEWSLETTER

OF THE

NEW ZEALAND MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY (INC.)

Contents

PUBLISHER’S NOTICE
EDITORIAL
PRESIDENT’S COLUMN
LOCAL NEWS
FEATURES
Centres of Research Excellence
The Numbers Game
Aitken Prize Winners
CENTREFOLD Geoff Whittle
NEW COLLEAGUES
BOOK REVIEWS
CONFERENCES
NOTICES
NZMS APPLICATIONS FOR FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE

MATHEMATICAL MINIATURE 17 The three-eighths rule and a figure eight three body orbit

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 Charles Semple, Secretary, NZ Mathematical Society,
Department of Mathematics and Statistics,
University of Canterbury,
Private Bag 4800, Christchurch.

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.html
Editorial enquiries and items for submission to this journal should be submitted as text or files to r.mclachlan@massey.ac.nz

EDITORIAL

ART NUMBER

The people who live in a Golden Age, wrote Randall Jarrell, usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. Now I'm not thinking here of the large cheques which will soon be wafting over the maths community---we'll get to that---but of mathematics in the general culture. Basically, we've never had it so good.

Maybe it all started with the films Pi and Good Will Hunting. And Breaking the Code. Then there was Proof, a play by David Auburn, still running in New York after several years and soon to open in London with Gwyneth Paltrow. (Hey, maybe we could get Madeleine Sami to do it in New Zealand.) It's about a mathematician, his daughter, and his student. There's even been Fermat's Last Tango, a musical, yes, a musical, about Andrew Wiles. Then we have Alan Alda playing Richard Feynman in the play QED---bound to be a movie soon---and of course A Beautiful Mind. Where will it all end?

Before I saw A Beautiful Mind I had been imagining a humorous mathematician's review of it---"But they didn't even cover the Nash-Moser implicit function theorem!"---but I am stymied on that score. The mathematics was really well done and the film is carried forward by its strong story line. I particularly liked the grad student at the end who comes up to Nash with his ideas on Galois theory. As far as I could make out, this was a reference to Grothendieck's epic underground "Galois theory of everything", supposedly circulating in photocopied form since the mid 1980s, after Grothendieck retreated to his small stone hut in the Pyrenees. Maybe they could make a film about him?

Far be it from me to speculate on what it all means. But it's got to be good for us all. In this issue we get in on the act in a small way, with an article on art and mathematics. This was a show at the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University in 2000, so if you missed it that's too bad, I only just found out about it myself, but it is fairly easy to contact any of the artists. There was also a big show on Art \& Mathematics in New York at the same time, you can read about it (with links to the home pages of the artists) at http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek\_11_4\_00.html. The only current exhibition I can tell you about is Calculus, a show by John Edgar at the Dowse in Lower Hutt until 12 May. Not calculus as in "an area of advanced mathematics in which continually changing values are studied" as the Cambridge Dictionary has it rather vaguely, that's calculus, a concretion in an animal's body, or calculus, a small stone used in reckoning. These are rather beautiful river stones, slices of which are replaced by glass, arranged in what might be equations.

Now, back to that golden age. You will all have heard the outcome of the selection of the Centres of Research Excellence. Five centres were chosen, of which two have a large mathematics component, which represents an absolutely outstanding outcome for our community. These two are the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, discussed in an interview with Marston Conder in this issue, and the Allan Wilson Centre for Evolution and Ecology, which includes a large bioinformatics component and is reported on by Mike Hendy. Furthermore, Shuan Hendy at IRL (really a mathematician) is part of the Alan McDiarmid Centre for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology.

A proposal for a similar mathematics institute in the state of Victoria has reached the final round, and, no surprise here, this has prompted New South Wales mathematicians to prepare a bid too. Trans-Tasman rivalry being what it is, the success of the NZIMA can hardly hurt them!

One other Centre might be relevant to us. Linda Smith at the University of Auckland says that one of the goals of the Centre Nga Pae o te Maramatanga is to produce 500 Mori PhDs within 6 years. "Building Maori capability in research is one of the key programmes that Nga Pae o te Maramatanga will be investing in. We would hope that these graduates come from across the disciplines and the CoRE intends to `cross-train' many of them through their involvement in research programmes." I'd encourage all NZMS members to keep an eye on this activity and think about ways we can support it and use this resource to get more Mori involvement in advanced mathematics.

Robert McLachlan
Massey University

PRESIDENT'S COLUMN

As I am writing this, I have recently heard that the NZ Institute of Mathematics and its Applications has just received its funding from the CoRE committee. There are two articles regarding this in the newsletter. This is very exciting for mathematics since proposals for streams are open from anyone in New Zealand. The time frame for getting these proposals together was very short and it is a credit, especially to Marston Conder and the commitment of Vaughan Jones to us, that a group from mathematics got together a proposal that was so highly regarded by the (mainly external) panel. A tribute to the development of mathematics in this our jubilee year.

Additionally, I have been in discussions with \linebreak Vitali Milman, president of the Israel Math Society who is strongly proposing that we have joint meetings with Israel, and I am hoping that we might have one here in 2003 or 2004, probably in \linebreak February.

Finally, I would like to express the society's gratitude to Graeme Wake's sterling efforts as president over the last years.

Graeme Wake
President (1999-2001)
(currently in Oxford!)

LOCAL NEWS

AGRESEARCH

For your correspondent it's been a case of another month another conference. I was at the colloquium at Massey in December, the summer workshop of the New Zealand Mathematics Research Institute in Napier in January, and ANZIAM 2002 in Canberra in February. At ANZIAM I presented an invited paper "Mathematical models for intestinal parasites", and at ANZIAM and the colloquium I was on the judging panel for the student prize. In case you think that the venues are getting progressively more exotic, the next visit is to the Center for Research on the Application and Advancement of Mathematics (P4M), Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia; to present some lectures as part of Industrial Mathematics Week, April 29 -- May 4. The theme is "Mathematical Modelling of the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases".

The Statistics Group of AgResearch were heavily involved in organising the Biometrics/NZSA 2001 Conference held at the Park Royal Hotel in Christchurch last December. Peter Johnstone, as regional President of the IBS, gave the opening address. David Baird was chairman of the local organizing committee, Dave Saville the treasurer, Harold Henderson chaired the programme committee and negotiated substantial corporate sponsorship, and Roger Littlejohn was the webmaster of http://nzsa.rsnz.govt.nz/Conference/home.htm. Attendance was a record 220-odd, including a few not odd! There were 116 papers. The venue was a great success, with hotel staff feeding us extremely well and the Christmas holly and other decorations adding to the festive air. The sun shone on the social events, and added to the success of the conference trips. Harold H and Dave S even found time to give papers, entitled respectively "Visualising data" and "Teaching the gospel of statistics." Peter Johnstone and Ken Dodds also presented papers, entitled respectively "The application of mixed models to microarray experiments" and "Using a backcross to single animal for a QTL confirmation experiment." Martin Upsdell presented in the Bayesian Workshop. The Southern Summer Institute of Statistical Genetics which followed the conference picked up themes of genomics and bioinformatics, and was attended by a 100 people including a strong contingent of 20 AgResearch staff.

On another angle, Dave Saville and Graham Wood (Massey) are awaiting the publication of a paper on the geometry of the p-value, entitled

"A new angle on the t-test," to appear in April in issue #1 for 2002 of "The Statistician" (JRSS-D)---watch that space!

Mick Roberts

UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

Department of Engineering Science

On 16 March Cecil Segedin died, after a short illness, aged 86. Cecil was the foundation HOD of our department (originally called the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics), from its formation in 1963 until his retirement in 1981. A tribute to Cecil by Mervyn Rosser appeared as a centrefold in the NZMS Newsletter for March 1981, and one by your correspondent in the Mathematical Chronicle, Volume 10, part 3, pp. 176-181, 1982. The latter included a list of Cecil's published papers. The monograph "Mathematics and Models in Engineering Science" (A. McNabb, R.A. Wooding & M. Rooser, eds.), DSIR, 1982, is the record of a symposium held in Cecil's honour. In fact, Cecil had a virtually unbroken association with the University dating back to 1933 when he matriculated as an Entrance Scholar from Auckland Grammar. He graduated BSc as Senior Scholar in Pure Mathematics and MSc with First Class Honours in 1937. He was appointed to a Temporary Junior Lectureship in Mathematics in 1937 and gained tenure as a Lecturer after the war. He was promoted to SL in 1948, to AP in 1958 and to Professor in 1968. At Cecil's funeral, a eulogy was given by Mike O'Sullivan, and two others of Cecil's former students (Peter Brothers and your correspondent, who was Cecil's first PhD student) were pallbearers. Cecil is survived by his wife, Barbara, and two daughters, Rosemary (a DES graduate) and Jill.

We have two new Lecturers. Michael O'Sullivan (Mike's son), one of our MPhil graduates, is back after gaining a PhD at Stanford. His interests are in network design, stochastic dynamic programming, and genetic algorithms. Another DES graduate (BE, PhD), Nic Smith is back after postdoctoral work at Oxford. His interests are in the mathematical modeling of cardiac tissue (particularly metabolism) and applying the finite element method to multiscale models of muscle contraction.

Mike O'Sullivan is again HOD, vice David Ryan, who is enjoying a sabbatical leave in various parts of Europe. Murray Smith has resigned to take up a position at NIWA.

Don Nield

Department of Computer Science

Dr Kevin Novins is now a Lecturer. He works in Graphics and Image Processing.

Seminars

Associate Professor Bakhadyr Khoussainov, "On algebraic specifications of abstract data types".

Professor Glen G Langdon Jr, "An efficient algorithm for exploiting multiple arithmetic units: the Tomasulo algorithm".

Dr Jack Douglas Stecher (University of Minnesota), "How complex is the message space?".

Thomas Olsson (Lund University), "Information modelling and software engineering research at Lund University, Sweden".

Myra Cohen, "Testing component interactions in software systems: combinatorial aspects".

Professor Larry Snyder, "What should everyone know about information technology?".

Professor Berghel Hal, "Internet security 2002: a survival guide".

Professor Bob Doran, "Why do we make it all so difficult?".

Professor Ross Jeffery, "Achieving successful software process improvement in smaller organizations".

Dr Daniela Damian, "Empirical studies of requirements negotiations in geographically distributed software development".

Professor Herman Maurer (Grätz University & University of Auckland), "Psychic Phenomena, Magic, Miracles, ... and Technology".

Department of Mathematics

Cecil Marin Segedin matriculated here in 1933, and in 1938 he became a Junior Lecturer in Mathematics. Later he transferred to the School of Engineering, where he founded the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. On Cecil's retirement, Newsletter 20 (March 1981) featured him in the Centrefold. He continued until 1995 to assist his daughter Rosemary in the Student Learning Unit, as an unpaid tutor assisting beginners to prepare for university mathematics courses. Cecil died on 2002 March 16, at the age of 86. His funeral was attended by about 200 relatives, friends, colleagues and former students, with many tributes being read from former students of Cecil, who are now in academic positions around the world.

James Sneyd, currently at Massey University-Albany, has been appointed as Professor of Applied Mathematics.

Wayne Walker had been on sick leave since he tripped and fractured an arm in May 2001, with a stroke following surgery. Wayne has made a good recovery, and he retired at the end of the academic year 2001.

Bill Barton has been promoted to Associate Professor. Geoff Nicholls and Shayne Waldron have been promoted to Senior Lecturer. Allison Heard and Pam Hurst have been promoted above the bar in the Senior Tutors scale.

William Latu (from Mt Roskill Grammar School) and Garry Nathan (from Auckland College of Education) have been appointed as Tutors, jointly with the Department of Statistics. William will concentrate on Pacific Island students and Garry will concentrate on Maori students. Sheena Parnell (from Papakura High School) is the Departmental Teaching Fellow for 2002. Jerry Lane (from Mangere College), Mala Nataraj (from Selwyn College) and Carolyn Vela (from Maungawhau Primary School) are our 3 RSNZ Fellows. Barbara Miller (from Glendowie College) who shares an office with Barbara Miller-Reilly, and Arnold Van Den Heuvel (from Westlake Boys High School) are both on Study Awards, and they are working as researchers on the Mathematics Enhancement Project in Manukau schools.

Prof Vladimir Golubjatnikov from the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics in Novosibirsk (Russia), is visiting us for this semester as a Fulbright Professor. He will teach courses MATH 328 and MATH 130. Dr Nick Dudley Ward is here for the year, and will teach some applied mathematics courses.

Recent visitors include Prof James Kaput (University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth), Prof John Cannon (University of Sydney), Prof Kevin Burrage (University of Sydney), Dr George Havas (University of Queensland), Dr Kay Magaard (Wayne State, Detroit), Prof Janet McShane (Northern Arizona, Flagstaff), Prof Akos Seress (Ohio State), Prof David Epstein (Warwick University), and Prof Neil Robertson (Ohio State University).

Gaven Martin and Tadeusz Iwaniec (Syracuse University) have written a research monograph on "Geometric Function Theory and Non-Linear Mappings", which has been published by Oxford Science Publications.

At the 5th Devonport Topology Festival, Warren Moors (University of Waikato) gave an invited address on "A characterization of the Namioka property"

Seminars

Dr Michael Thomas, "Learning mathematics with technology: theoretical and empirical perspectives".

Dr Eamonn O'Brien, "Effective algorithms for the study of modular representations".

Professor John Cannon (University of Sydney), "Software tools for public key cryptography" (jointly with Computer Science), and "Finite or infinite?".

Dr Bruce Calvert, "Some analysis with networks".

Professor Jozef Siran (Slovak Technical University), "Links between graph theory, group theory, geometry, Riemann surfaces and \linebreak Galois theory".

Dr Jianbei An, "Local determination and a conjecture in the representation theory of finite groups".

Professor Katsuhiro Uno (University of Osaka), "Conjectures on character degrees of finite groups".

Dr Carlo Laing (University of Ottawa), "Memory, perceptual oscillations and issues in computational science and interactive visualisation".

Professor Kevin Burrage (University of Queensland), "Two factors", and "Visualisation and virtual reality".

Dr George Havas (University of Queensland), "A census of perfect groups with short presentations".

Dr Kay Magaard (Wayne State, Detroit), "Groups of genus zero".

Professor Janet McShane (Northern Arizona, Flagstaff), "Properties of representation graphs of certain finite groups".

Professor Akos Seress (Ohio State University), "Short presentations for rank one groups".

Professor David Epstein (Warwick University), "The logarithmic spiral: counterexample to a conjecture of Thurston and Sullivan".

Professor Carsten Thomassen, (Technical University of Denmark), "On some fundamental properties of the Euclidean plane".

Dr Warren Moors (University of Waikato), "Some recent results concerning weak Asplund spaces".

Dr Anthony Blaom (Princeton University), "The Geometry of reconstruction in Hamiltonian systems with symmetry".

Professor Marian Neamtu (Vanderbilt University), "Shape-preserving approximation".

Dr Norman Wildberger (UNSW), "Hypergroups and sums of Hermitian matrices".

Associate Professor James Sneyd (Massey \mbox{University---Albany)}, "A (somewhat mathematical) tale of two cells, two receptors and two waves".

Professor David Gao (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University), "Duality and triality: unifying mathematics, science and engineering".

Professor Christian Beck (University of London), "Generalized statistical mechanics and fully developed turbulence".

Professor Reinout Quispel (La Trobe University), "Geometric numerical integration \linebreak methods".

Dr Manuel Lladser (Ohio State University), "Parameter varying Fourier-Laplace integrals: some 2 to 3 degenerate case applications".

Dr Allison Heard, "Stability of variable stepsize methods for ODEs".

Dr Ian Cohen (KTH, Stockholm), "New developments in undergraduate mechanics courses". \vspace{-5mm} Dr Nora Hartsfield (Western Washington University), "Self-dual embeddings of strongly regular self-complementary graphs".

Dinna Balling (University of Southern Denmark), "How do teachers in Denmark use the graphing calculator in mathematics education? A presentation of a PhD project".

Dr Oleg Davydov (Justus-Liebig-Universit\"at, Giessen), "Approximation with smooth multivariate piecewise polynomials".

Dr Csaba Schneider (UWA), "Permutation groups and Cartesian decompositions". Dr Benjamin Steinberg (Universidade do Porto), "Some topological and geometric techniques in finite state automata theory".

David Godfrey, "Engaging with arithmetic in algebraically thoughtful ways: An initial discussion".

Professor Vitali Milman (Tel-Aviv University), "Surprising geometric phenomena in high-dimensional convexity".

Dr Kay Irwin (Department of Education), "What aspects do we need to research about the New Zealand numeracy programme?".

Professor John Butcher (NZMS Lecturer), "Numerical methods for ordinary differential equations: a millenium survey".

Department of Statistics

Prof Alastair Scott has been appointed as Associate Dean of Science for Research & for Tamaki. \linebreak Alastair will continue to be based at Tamaki, and he will assume the Science Faculty Research portfolio.

Seminars

Dr Vladimir Obolonkin, "Belarus and Chernobyl: Facts and thoughts from a statistician-insider".

Dr Mark Holme (UBC), "Self-avoiding walks (and percolation)".

Dr Ildar Gabitov (Landau Inst Moscow & Theory Division Los Alamos), "Modelling of ultrashort pulse dynamics in optical fibers with randomly varying characteristics".

Dr Jeffrey Hunter (Massey University-Albany), "Generalized inverses and their use in stochastic modelling".

Dr Anthony Lehmann (Swiss Centre for Faunal Cartography), "GRASP: Generalized Regression Analysis and Spatial Prediction in ecology".

Dr Garrett van Ryzin (Columbia University), "Revenue management under a general discrete choice model of consumer behavior".

Dr Alan Champneys (University of Bristol), "Non-local bifurcation of solitary waves for coupled nonlinear Schroedinger systems".

Garry J. Tee

UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

At the start of this year, we farewelled four of our colleagues: Bev Haberfield (Secretary), David Glynn (Senior Lecturer), John Spain (Senior Technician), and Peter Waylen (Senior Lecturer). Bev and Peter have both given over 30 years service to the department. We wish them all well in their future endeavours.

Congratulations to Mike Steel for being part of two of the successful bids for CoRE funding. He is a Principal Investigator in the New Zealand Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (based at the University of Auckland) and the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution (based at Massey University, Palmerston North).

Congratulations to Shinji Yamamoto who has recently completed his PhD in Mathematics under the supervision of Graeme Wake and David Wall. His thesis is titled "Linear and non-linear integral equation population models".

Seminars

Elchanan Mossel (Microsoft Research), "Phase transitions and phylogeny".

Jack Stecher (University of Minnesota), "How Complex is the Message Space?".

Sagi Snir (Technion, Israel), "Four Taxon ML Forks under Molecular Clock: Analytic Solutions".

Birgit Loch (University of Queensland), "3D leaf surface modelling".

Neil Robertson (Ohio State University), "On Five Graph Colouring Problems".

Shinji Yamamoto, "Integral equation population model".

Nye John (University of Waikato), "Crossover Designs in Clinical".

Oleg Davydov (University of Giessen), "Scattered data fitting with bivariate splines on a four directional mesh".

Chris Price

INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH LIMITED

Applied Mathematics Team

The Applied Maths team is associated with two of the successful CoRE proposals which were announced in March. Graham Weir is a member of the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and Shaun Hendy is a member of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology.

Graham Weir and Shaun Hendy both attended ANZIAM 2002 in Canberra. There was a very interesting session on granular flow at ANZIAM this year, and Shaun gave a talk on "Granular Plasticity" while Graham gave a talk on "Mixing in Rotating Cylinders". In the week prior to ANZIAM, Shaun attended the Australian and New Zealand Condensed Matter meeting in Wagga Wagga and gave a talk on "Light Scattering in Glass-Ceramics". At the end of February, Graham attended the Australasian Congress on Applied Mechanics in Sydney and gave a talk on "Mohr-Coulomb Criteria for Failure".

Stephen White attended this year's Geothermal Workshop in Auckland and gave a talk on "Modelling high temperature two phase chemistry associated with magmatic intrusions".

Graham has taken over from Jeremy Astley as the IUTAM representative for the NZ Royal Society. He attended his first committee meeting on March 26th.

Finally, the Applied Maths team was externally reviewed at the end of March by Professor Michael Kelly from the University of Surrey. These reviews are part of an on-going quality control process within IRL.

Seminars

Dietmar Cieslik (Greifswald), "Steiner's Problem".

Sverker Edvardsson (Mid Sweden University), "An introduction to crystal field and its effect on optical properties".

Shaun Hendy

MASSEY UNIVERSITY

Institute of Fundamental Sciences

Mathematics

Our warmest congratulations to Mike Hendy who has not only been successful in securing government funding for a Centre of Research Excellence- the Allan Wilson Centre but has also had success as a Principal Investigator in the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

As Mike Hendy is now a Co-Director of the Allan Wilson Center for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Mike decided to forgo his role as Discipline Leader and Mike Carter has agreed to be the new Discipline Leader.

The phylogenetics group has had a busy summer. Beginning with Dietmar Cieslik, from the BioMathematcs undergraduate teaching programme at Griefswald in Germany, who visited from September to January, they have had a steady stream of overseas visitors. Kathi Huber and husband Vince Moulton made their annual escape from the northern Swedish winter (Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall) to work with us at Massey. Kathi finished a paper on the network building computer package developed by Kathi, Mike Hendy and others, with the program written by Michael Langton, who has now graduated 1st Class Hons (Maths) and has headed south to Wellington and into the computer industry. Vince worked with our PhD student Paul Gardner and the biology student Anthony Poole (who had just completed his PhD and is staying on as a Research Fellow) on computer recognition of RNA "proteins", which, unlike the DNA, do not have easily recognisable signals to identify them. Our third Swede, Sverker Edvardson, also from Sundsvall, a mathematical physicist also working on this project joined them. The result of that collaboration has delivered some exciting output, which has lead to one paper, with two more on the drawing board, as the biologists now do their part in confirmation of the new "suspect" RNA. The training was done on a yeast genome, and provided the biology confirms these candidates, they will apply these tools to much larger genomes, including the human sequence.

Kathi and Vince headed back early, but have doubled their distance from the Arctic Circle, by joining the Linnaeus Center for Bioinformatics in Uppsala, although Vince is at the University of Uppsala, while Kathi is at the neighbouring Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. We then had a brief visit from Benny Chor's PhD student, Sagi Chor from the Technion in Israel, who came to work with Mike Hendy.

Mike however had been rather distracted over the summer preparing CoRE bids. Although some early thoughts about possible groupings had been discussed, both the NZIMA and the AWCMEE strategy planning began at about the same time---late! As a co-director (with Massey biologist, David Penny) of the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution (http://awcmee.massey.ac.nz), this took the major effort on Mike's part. AWCMEE involves NZ scientists at 6 universities (Auckland, Massey, Victoria, Canterbury, Otago and Oxford), but is unique in having a significant collaboration across the mathematics and biology interface. Other mathematical input comes from Mike Steel and Hamish Spencer. When the timetable for the CoRE selection was announced, he discovered that the site visits to the short-listed applicant groups would coincide with the annual phylogenetics workshop, this year scheduled for Whitianga in February.

However, running late to a meeting with our AVC (Research), David Penny slipped, and arrived in hospital instead, with a torn ligament. Unwilling to miss the Whitianga meet, David, newly discharged from hospital was driven to Whitianga (lying across the back seat) by Mike and Sagi. During the first session there, Mike received the call from Massey instructing them to return for the site visit later that week. Shortly after, Marston Conder, also attending the workshop, learned that the NZIMA was also shortlisted. Hence David and Mike cut short their week, and returned to Palmerston North with one day to prepare for the grilling.

Now the outcomes are known, out of 54 original abstracts, and 45 full submissions, both the NZIMA and the AWCMEE were among the 11 shortlisted and finally the 5 Centres selected by the CoRE committee of the Royal Society to receive CoRE funding. Now AWCMEE have the opportunity to develop the mathematical applications in Ecology and Evolution. A very tangible fruit of that collaboration is the first paper to acknowledge AWCMEE the measuring of nucleotide substitution rates from DNA preserved in permafrost, extracted from Adelie penguin bones. This appeared as the cover item in Science March 22, by a team led by Massey ecologist David Lambert, and with Barbara Holland, our former PhD mathematics student, as co-author. (Barbara is now in a lecturing position at Bochum, Germany, but will be returning in May for her graduation.)

Congratulations to Tammy Smith on her appointment as a lecturer. Currently Tammy is doing a Postdoc under Professor Parry. Tammy will take up her position on the first of July. We also wish to congratulate Jonathan Marshall who has been appointed as a Tutor for one year.

John Giffin who changed Institutes (joining the Stats group) a few years ago is about to change Universities and Islands. John is off to his Alma Mater, the University of Canterbury (The Mainland). John will be taking up a Senior Lecturer position in the Management Science group, Dept of Management, Faculty of Commerce. John has been here 15 years teaching Operations Research and Decision Sciences and has supervised 11 PhD students. As of the time of writing it is not clear what the future of Decision Sciences will be at Massey, as it is coming increasingly difficult to attract students from the College of Business. Some of us will miss John's wit and the rumour is circulating that the Stats group is searching for someone to replace his sarcastic input. Thank you John for your contribution especially in instilling students (and some staff) the correct usage of `less' and `fewer'. All the best.

Robert McLachlan and Paul Gardner attended the NZMRI Napier workshop in January. Robert is planning a year's sabbatical from June 2002, involving 6 weeks at the University of Geneva working with Gerhard Wanner and Ernst Hairer, and the remainder at the Special Year on Geometric Integration at the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in Oslo. Baby Helena had better wrap up warm.

Bruce van Brunt attended the `Surface Approximation and Visualization Conference' in Westport 19-22 February. Typically, Bruce departed for said conference on 2 February and disappeared into the West Coast bush/Southern Alps for over two weeks eventually emerging at the Cook River from La Perouse to enjoy the luxurious conference venue at Westport. The conference was a great success with delegates from most NZ universities, many international delegates, and an impressive list of invited speakers.

Charles returned late January from his trip around the world. Welcome back Charles. From Charles:

"I enjoyed my visit to the Georgia Institute of Technology for the autumn semester last year, working on Pfaffian graphs with Robin Thomas and several other visitors. I also taught first year linear algebra and third year combinatorics papers, and found the students to be very bright and enthusiastic---a real pleasure to teach. For the return trip, my wife Barbara and I completed our first journey around the world. We stopped first to visit family in Canada and Britain, and then proceeded to Austria, where I gave seminars in Vienna, Leoben and Klagenfurt. We visited Rome and the Vatican purely as tourists, and then stayed for five days with a colleague, Kevin McAvaney, at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman. Oman was a new country for us, and I found it quite fascinating. Kevin drove us into the interior of the country, where we witnessed a goat auction and visited castles at Jabrin and Nizwa. The country is materially well off---even in a tiny village in the interior each roof seemed to have a satellite dish. Our final stop was Singapore, where I gave another seminar."

Igor took overseas leave in February and March and headed across the Tasman Sea to Australia. He first attended the ANZIAM 2002 conference held at Canberra (1-6 February) where he presented a paper. After Canberra, Igor visited the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Western Australia in Perth. The main purpose of his visit was to do collaborative research with his colleagues at this University.

Padma Senerath will be off to the USA to attend the "Finsler Geometry" Conference held at the University of Berkeley (June 3-7).

As you may have heard by now our Vice-Chancellor is leaving Massey to take up a VCship at the University of Adelaide. We do not know when he is leaving however (thanks to www.adelaide.edu.au) we know that he will take up his new position on the 5th of August. We wonder if staff will have any input with the appointment of a new VC.

Seminars

Professor Neil Robertson (Ohio State University), "On five graph colouring problem".

Graduate Seminar Series

Tammy Smith, "Head domain organization in intermediate filaments: A special role for coiled-coil segment 1A and linker L1".

Robert Mclachlan, "How to count trees, or the asymptotics of generating functions".

Marijcke Vlieg-Hulstman

Institute of Information Sciences and Technology

Statistics

The Institute of Information Sciences and Technology, of which we are a part, moved from our current location in the Social Sciences Tower to occupy a floor or two of the AgHort building on the other side of the campus. The statisticians however were left behind for the time being as there is insufficient space. Once we lose a few more staff members we should fit in easily. There has been much discussion of appropriate new names for the building, but a recent suggestion to sell the naming rights has so far not been taken up. Anyone wishing to make a bid should contact Corporate Communications.

Alasdair Noble, who has been teaching at Massey for five years in various capacities, has been given a two-year lectureship to replace Ganesalingam, who has taken up a two-year associate professorship in Oman. Alasdair is close to finishing his PhD, the actual distance depending on who you talk to. He presented his work last year at the RSS Conference in Glasgow and the Wayne Fuller 70th Birthday Conference at Iowa State.

Steve Haslett visited the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington DC. He reported no sightings so far of terrorists or anthrax. He must have been operating with a very limited definition of "terrorist". Meanwhile in the other Washington, Graham Wood was been visiting Zelda Zabinsky at Washington State.

Doug Stirling has won further funding from Massey's Fund for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching to work on the development of a Business Statistics version of CAST. A key feature of the new system will be to confuse the user with jargon and then send them a bill for $5000.

Chungui Qiao, who has been visiting us, has now taken up an appointment as a Mathematical Statistician with Statistics NZ in Wellington.

Mark Bebbington spent the last week of November in Melbourne, working with Kostya Borovkov on conditions for stability of multidimensional piecewise deterministic Markov processes, (and not watching one day of the Davis cup final). But at least the cricket coverage from Perth was at a more civilised hour! Mark's next visit was to the state of matrimony, which should curb his travelling somewhat.

Three of our PhD students: Jonathan Godfrey, Dongwen Luo and Ryan Sherrif, presented at the NZSA conference in Christchurch in December. Jonathan won the prize for best student talk with his seminar "Two-stage imputation of missing genotype-by-environment data".

Finally, after a certain period of indecision, Graham Wood has decided to leave these shores for Macquarie University in Sydney, and John Giffin, after a much, much longer period, has decided to leave to join the Department of Management at Canterbury. He just hasn't told his mother yet. They will both be sorely missed.

Greg Arnold

Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences

Mathematics

James Sneyd will be soon leaving Massey to take up the chair of applied mathematics at Auckland University. Of course his departure will be a great loss to Massey but this is obviously a great oppourtunity for James and we wish him well. Although James was only at Massey for 2.5 years he made many contributions, the most significant being the part he played in obtaining the parallel computer for our institute.

Robert McKibbin and Mike Meylan attended the ANZIAM 2002, Canberra 2-6 February where Robert gave an invited talk, involving explosions, entitled "Immersion, dispersion, inertia 'n coercion---naturally" Robert was also elected Deputy Chair of ANZIAM for 2002 and 2003 and will be Chair of ANZIAM in 2004 and 2005. He helped to moderate a problem for MISG 2002 (Mathematics in Industry Study Group) on two-phase pipeline flows for SANTOS, an Australia-based oil company, in Adelaide, 11-15 February.

By the way, MISG will come to NZ for 2004 and 2005. ANZIAM 2005 will also be in NZ. The applied mathematicians in NZ are all going to be very busy during those two years!

Seminars

Francis Thio (NASA), "Fusion power for space propulsion.".

Oleg Davydov (Universität Giessen, Germany), "Smooth basis functions for approximation in two and more variables"

Mike Meylan

UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

During the second half of 2001, Dr Robert Aldred was on study leave, based primarily at the University of Aberdeen. A productive collaboration with Dr John Sheehan of Aberdeen and Professor Bill Jackson of Goldsmiths College in London continued with results obtained on regular graphs with unique 2-factors. From his Scottish base he travelled to Bratislava to work with Dr Paul Bonnington and Professor Jozef Siran and to Denmark to work with Professor Carsten Thomassen. Travelling through the USA to New Zealand, he managed a brief visit to Vanderbilt to work with Professors Mike Plummer and Mark Ellingham on some problems in matching theory. In all, a very stimulating and fruitful leave.

Dr Gerrard Liddell was also on study leave, engaged in mathematical projects that took him from Scandinavia to Arizona and many points between. The mathematics done (and the climate) was varied in the extreme. A highlight of Gerrard's leave was a visit to Wolfram Research, where he gave a well-attended seminar and had dinner with Stephen Wolfram himself.

Professor Yasuyuki Hirano, from Okayama University, Japan, visited John Clark for six days at the end of November, to work on problems in their common interest, ring theory.

Austina Clark visited Professor Anne Chao at Tsing Hua University in Taiwan in January for three weeks. They worked on the sample coverage approach to estimate population number. The Institute has only graduate students which consists of 40 Masters students and 11 PhD students. It is a good research environment. However, Austina found the weather really cold.

We are pleased to welcome Markus Neuhuser who arrived in December 2001 to take up a position as Senior Lecturer in Statistics. Markus' current research interests include nonparametric methods and multiple comparisons, as well as location-scale tests and their application in life sciences---especially in drug development, ecology, and ornithology. Markus and his wife Ulrike and son Lennart have had a busy time settling into a new house, just before their second child, Victoria, was born a month prematurely. (See New Colleagues section, this issue.)

With Derek Holton on study leave and Bryan Manly having left the Department, Vernon Squire began his seventh year as HOD as the only "full professor in residence". Sounds grand, but the truth is unfortunately somewhat different! The department has tried hard to replace Bryan but so far has had no luck, as senior statisticians are few and far between at the moment and it is hard to entice the few that are available to New Zealand where they will earn a salary that is significantly less than they currently receive. With the onset of the Performance Based Research Fund and pressure on statistics EFTS, the Department feels strongly that it needs leadership in the area and this is supported by the Assistant Vice-Chancellor of the Division. As well as his other duties, Vernon was a member of the working group that wrote the University of Otago's response to TEAC 4, to the TES and, most recently, to the proposed reforms to the Education Amendment Act. This has been time-consuming but important work. Along with convening a departmental review and helping to organize a conference, this has cut into research work but thankfully Tim and Gareth, Vernon's PhD student and research fellow, respectively, have made progress. The IAHR conference, due to take place in early December, has surprised the organisers by already having well over 200 abstracts so, if you are interested in ice engineering or hydrology, be quick.

Visitors.

In February/March of this year, Professor Carsten Thomassen visited the Mathematics and Statistics Department as a William Evans Fellow. The Department, University and City of Dunedin all benefited from a series of masterly presentations ranging from a very general discussion of graphs modelling networks to a detailed combinatorial proof of the Jordan Curve Theorem. Between speaking commitments, Carsten was able to continue some research projects with Robert Aldred and discuss various things with staff and students from a wide cross-section of the university.

Professor Mark M Meerschaert, University of Nevada, Reno, and Dr David A Benson, Desert Research Institute, Reno, came to visit us for 12 days in early January. Mark is an expert in stochastic processes and modeling, and Dave is a hydrologist looking at solute transport in groundwater. Both are collaborating with Dr Boris Baeumer on modelling transport through porous media using operator stable laws (an extension of the Central Limit Theorem) incorporating potentially long waiting times in dead zones making the process fractal in both space and time.

Seminars

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

Darryl I MacKenzie (North Carolina State University), "Darryl and Kerry's Excellent US Adventure!"

David Fletcher, "What You Won't Find in Introductory Statistics Books".

David Lusseau (Department of Zoology), "Markov chains, matrix algebra and dolphins: understanding the sustainability of anthropogenic impact on the behaviour of bottlenose dolphins".

Peter Johnstone (AgResearch), "The Application of Mixed Models to the Analysis of Micro-Array Experiments".

Professor Carsten Thomassen (The Technical University of Denmark), "A link between Kuratowski's Theorem and the Jordan Curve Theorem".

Lenette Grant

UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO

Department of Mathematics

There have been a few staffing changes in the department. Ingrid Melchert resigned her position at the end of last year so she could devote more time to her family. However, she is helping us this year with a few papers. Subsequently, Frances Kuo has taken up a one-year appointment as a lecturer in the department. Frances has just submitted her PhD thesis on constructive approaches to quasi-Monte Carlo methods for multiple integration.

Ian Hawthorn is currently on study leave. Though normally people go away on their study leave, Ian has bucked this trend by having Tom~Berger from Colby College, Maine, visit him from 1~February until the middle of July. Professor Berger was Ian's PhD thesis supervisor.

There were a number of visitors to the department in the January-February period. We had Yves Fautrelle from Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble/Madylam visiting Alfred Sneyd for about five weeks from 10~January. Stephen Joe had James Lyness from Argonne National Laboratory as a visitor. Other visitors were Ian Sloan and Josef Dick from the University of New South Wales who visited Stephen and Frances.

Ian Craig was able to get some respite from being the new Chairperson by going to the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara for about three weeks from the middle of February. There he participated in the programme on solar magnetism and related astrophysics.

Warren Moors went to the 30^th Winter School on Abstract Analysis held in the Czech Republic. Warren, Kevin Broughan, and their PhD student Sivajah Somasundaram attended the Devonport Topology Festival 2002 held in mid-February. Another traveller was Rua Murray who went to Westport to attend the Surface Approximation conference.

We congratulate Sivajah and Jacob Heerikhuisen (a former PhD student in the department) on their forthcoming wedding in early April. We wish them the best for their future life together.

Seminars

W Moors, "Topological dynamics".

J Dick (University of New South Wales), "An improved bound for the component-by-component construction of lattice rules for multivariate integration".

I Sloan (University of New South Wales), "Good approximations on the sphere, with applications to geodesy and the scattering of sound".

Y Fautrelle (Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble/Madylam), "Oscillations of a liquid metal drop under the influence of an alternating magnetic field, or the starfish experiment".

Stephen Joe

Department of Statistics

Apologies for the lack of news of the Statistics Department from the last few publications. Your correspondent spent some time in 2001 on sick leave or on reduced duties, following a fall which resulted in broken leg and a badly dislocated ankle. Complications have meant a slow recovery, but things seem to be almost back to normal now.

David Whittaker was on study leave for the first half of last year. Whilst on leave he visited Canberra to work with Dr Emlyn Williams at CSIRO. August saw the launch of a book, "Statistical Thinking for Managers" which is co-authored with Nye John and David Johnston of Loughborough. At the beginning of this year David was promoted to Associate Professor.

James Curran travelled to Seattle, USA, in February 2001 for research collaboration with Dr Chris Triggs. In September last year and again in January of this year, he went to the UK to work with Forensic Science Service. He also presented at the Southern Institute of Statistical Genetics with Bruce Weir. James was recently promoted to Senior Lecturer.

Several members went off-shore to conferences last year. Lyn Hunt travelled to Hamburg, Germany to attend the Mixtures 2001 Conference in July, 2001. Bill Bolstad attended Statistics 2001 Canada and the Fourth Canadian Conference in Applied Statistics, in July 2001. Murray Jorgensen attended the Applied Stochastic Models & Data Analysis, in France, June 2001 and the 16th International Workshop on Statistical Modelling---New trends in statistical modeling, in Denmark, in July. Nye John attended the Genstat Conference, in Australia and was an invited speaker at the ASERC Workshop on Innovations in Teaching Statistics in Newcastle, Australia, in June 2001.

Bill Bolstad and James Curran together with Martin Upsdell from AgResearch Ruakura presented a special one day workshop for AgResearch Statisticians in April 2001 at the University of Waikato. The programme was based on an introduction to sampling based Bayesian methods including Markov Chain Monte Carlo using BUGS. A similar workshop was held in conjunction with the Australasian Regional International Biometric Society/NZSA joint Conference in Christchurch in December 2001. All members of the department, together with our two PhD students and two of our Masters students were in Christchurch for the conference. Murray and Lyn both attended the Missing-Value Workshop held prior to the conference, although Murray left before the conference proper began. Before he left, Murray was presented with the 2001 Campbell Award of the NZSA for Editorial Services to the New Zealand Statistical Association. He is currently in Canada on leave, and after he returns in July, Nye John will undertake a period of study leave.

Carole Wright returned from Australia last year, to join the Department as a PhD student working with Nye John and David Whitaker on trying to obtain a class of row-column designs with the flexibility and advantages of alpha-designs, and finding tighter upper bounds on the average efficiency factor for latinized, spatial and row-column designs. After completing her Masters at Waikato in 1995 Carole commenced employment, as a biometrician with Agriculture Victoria, before going on to join the Northern Territory Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries in 1998, again employed as a biometrician.

Seminars

Associate Professor David Whitaker, "Integer programming: Constraint formulation with binary variables."

Dr Anthony Lehmann (Swiss Centre for Faunal Cartography (CSCF)), "GRASP: Generalized Regression Analysis and spatial Prediction in Ecology."

Professor Alastair Scott (Department of Statistics, University of Auckland), "Estimating Interviewer and Observer Effects for Binary Responses."

Professor Les Foulds (Department of Management Systems, University of Waikato), "Bookmobile Routing and Scheduling in Buskerud County, Norway."

Associate Professor Andy Philpott (Department of Engineering Science, University of Auckland), "Optimisation in electricity pool markets."

Associate Professor Chris Triggs (University of Auckland), "The strength of evidence found by searching a database".

Professor Neville Davies (Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education Nottingham Trent University), "The work of The Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education."

Dr Harold Henderson (AgResearch, Ruakura), "Visualising data."

Dr James Curran, "Interpretation of DNA evidence".

Dr Eibe Frank (Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato), "Determining progression in glaucoma using visual fields."

Dr Ilze Ziedins (Department of Statistics, University of Auckland), "Long range dependence in networks---Does a finite buffer with long range dependent input always have long range dependent output?".

Dr Graham McBride (NIWA, Hamilton), "Coping with the "swinging evidential burden" in environmental science and management."

Professor Pierre Legendre (Department of Biological Sciences, University of Montreal), "Modelling spatial influences at all spatial scales."

Dr Gad Nathan (Department of Statistics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem), "Imputation for wave nonresponse---a time series approach."

Professor John Neuhaus (Division of Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco), "The analysis of case-control family data."

Judi McWhirter

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON

School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences

Vladimir Pestov has accepted a Professorship in Mathematics at the University of Ottawa (Canada), effective as of July 1 this year. After ten years at Victoria, he is to be embraced by the North Atlantic research community. Our loss is their gain. We are very sorry to see Vladimir going, and we do wish him all the best in Canada. Vladimir will be teaching in French (as well as English) within two years!

Irene Pestov, who has (subsequent to her PhD here) been working on groundwater as a Research Scientist for the Bureau of Rural Sciences in Canberra, is presently back in Wellington, learning French, and will also be going to Ottawa in July.

Two VUW people went to the ANZIAM 38th Applied Maths Conference in Canberra in February: Rose Gong who spoke on using scattering of light to study smoke particles, and John Harper on rising bubbles testing water contamination.

Mark McGuinness went to the Mathematics-in-Industry Study Group in Adelaide, worked with Robert McKibbin and others on terrain-induced slugging in two-phase flow in gas/condensate pipelines, and played volleyball against Australia. Mark had just returned from 6 months Research and Study Leave, with his entire family, in Southampton, Nottingham (where he attended the Second Mathematics-in-Medicine Study Group), Oxford, Brisbane, and Melbourne. Now as pay-back he is Programme Director in mathematics...

We are in the process of making two new appointments in mathematics, to replace Vladimir and Chris Grigson. Chris retired last year, and is enjoying the life-style in Nelson.

Statistics has been joined by two new staff members, Dr Dong Wong from RMIT, Australia, and Dr Richard Arnold from Statistics NZ.

Ross Renner is currently on Research and Study Leave at Simon Fraser, after handing over the leadership of the School to Peter Donelan.

We are delighted to welcome the new Chair in Statistics, Professor Estate Khmaladze, who arrived on March 21 accompanied by his wife, mother and daughter. Professor Khmaladze is a probabilist.

Geoff Whittle is taking a well-earned Research and Study Leave, after gaining a personal Chair in mathematics, and a fellowship of the Royal Society of NZ. Geoff has been taking his leave here in Wellington, with a number of visitors coming to see him at various times.

Seminars

Jim Geelen (Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, Ontario), "Multicommodity Flows".

Matthew Hennesy (University of Sussex), "Process equivalence in the presence of Types".

Petr Hlineny, "Extending Courcelle's M S₂ Theorem to Matroids over Finite Fields".

Jean Bacon (Cambridge University), "OASIS: implementation issues".

Vitali Milman (Tel-Aviv University), "Surprising geometric phenomena in high-dimensional convexity".

Mark Moir (Sun Microsystems), "Memory Management for Dynamic-Sized Lock-Free Data Structures".

Neil Dodgson, "Towards a Bestiary of Subdivison Schemes".

Detlef Seese (University of Karlsruhe), "Complexity Management and Structure: A survey on results and problems".

Hal Berghel (University of Nevada), "Internet Security 2002: A Survival Guide".

John Gough (QUT Brisbane), "Microsoft, Project 7, and the dream of a Universal Language".

Markus Hegland (Australian National University), "Sparse Grids---Algorithms for Fitting Large High-Dimensional Data".

Richard Arnold, "Bayesian Spectral Analysis of White Dwarf Light Curves".

Nuovella Williams, "QTL Mapping: Finding Trait-Controlling Genes in a Genomic Haystack".

Tracey Bai, "Simple Models for Interferor \linebreak Powers".

Tony Vignaux, "Some examples of dimensional analysis in OR and Statistics".

Shirley Pledger, "Using mixtures to model heterogeneity in capture-recapture models".

Ross Renner, "Modelling an analysis of geochemical compositional data: Heavy metal pollution in the Baltic".

Sue Paul (PA Consultants), "Operational research techniques in the fishing industry---a case study".

Mark McGuinness

Continued