NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS (NZIMA) Newsletter 4 August 2004 Welcome to the fourth quarterly newsletter of the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (NZIMA), one of New Zealand's seven Centres of Research Excellence. We hope you find the contents helpful and interesting. Marston Conder and Vaughan Jones Co-Directors of the NZIMA SUMMARY OF CONTENTS 1. Highlights of the NZIMA's second year 2. Profile of Maclaurin Fellow: Rod Gover 3. Recent NZIMA-sponsored visitors and events 4. Forthcoming conferences in the mathematical sciences in NZ 1. NZIMA HIGHLIGHTS The NZIMA has just completed its second year of operation. Our annual report for this 2003/04 year is available on the NZIMA publications website http://www.nzima.auckland.ac.nz/Publications.html A few of the highlights in the report are the following: * Four thematic research programmes were supported during 2003/04, in - Logic and computation - Modelling cellular function - Numerical methods for evolutionary problems - Phylogenetic genomics All have brought together leading experts in their theme area, to take part in highly successful research workshops (held at various places around New Zealand), and have appointed postdoctoral fellows and postgraduate research students to work with the programme directors, who are based at several different departments and institutes around the country. Reports on these programmes have been uniformly positive. * Special issues of journals Proceedings of NZIMA programmes are being published in special issues of international journals, with programme directors as guest editors. For example, research articles by selected participants in the Logic and Computation programme will appear in a special issue of "Annals of Pure and Applied Logic"; similarly, 23 articles by invited speakers at the NZIMA workshop on Modelling Cellular Function will appear in a special volume of "Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology", and proceedings of one of the meetings held as part of the Numerical Methods programme will appear in an issue of "Applied Numerical Mathematics". * Awards and Honours A significant number of people involved with the NZIMA have won awards and honours in the last year, including the International Conference of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering (ICCMSE) Prize for Computational Mathematics, the NZ Association of Scientists' Research Medal, the NZ Mathematical Society's annual Research Award, the Royal Society of New Zealand's Hamilton Memorial Prize, and the Royal Society of New Zealand's Hatherton Award for 2003. * Permutation Patterns conferences In 2003 the NZIMA supported financially the involvement of young researchers at a conference on Permutation Patterns held at the University of Otago. We have since learnt that this support was a key factor in the success of the conference - later named PP2003 - and that the conference initiated an annual event: PP2004 was held on Vancouver Island in July 2004 (with support from Canada's NSERC), and preparations are well underway for PP2005 in Gainesville, Florida (with support from the USA's NSF), and for PP2006 in Sweden. 2. PROFILE OF FULL-TIME MACLAURIN FELLOW FOR 2004: ROD GOVER Dr Rod Gover (University of Auckland) is spending 12 months from February 2004 investigating several research issues in conformal differential geometry and related structures. The broad aim of his programme is to develop tools and techniques that will enable the use of Lie representation theory and certain geometric constructions to solve problems on conformal geometries, CR geometries and related structures, as well as applications of these tools in mathematical physics. Rod's fellowship coincides with a special year in this area of research, with many workshops and conferences being held around the world. He has been a participant and speaker at a semester-long workshop on the subject at the Erwin Schroedinger Institute for Mathematical Physics, Vienna, a workshop on geometric partial differential equations at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Singapore, and a 5-day workshop at the Banff Research Station in Canada, as well as delivering papers at several other international meetings. 3. RECENT NZIMA-SPONSORED VISITORS AND EVENTS * Visit by Herve Moulin (Rice University, Texas) Professor Herve Moulin visited the University of Auckland in March 2004 to work with Dr Arkadii Slinko on scheduling probabilistic mechanisms that satisfy the minimal liability test. * Visit by Walter Bossert (University of Montreal) Professor Walter Bossert visited the University of Auckland in April 2004 to work with Dr Arkadii Slinko on the topic of decision-making under uncertainty and the attitude of decision-makers towards uncertainty. As above, this is an area that is of interest in economics, applied mathematics and operations research. * VIC 2004 A week-long international conference, VIC2004, took place in Wellington (with sponsorship from the NZIMA) during the week 9-13 February 2004, to present research in a number of areas of fundamental importance in contemporary mathematics. This highly successful meeting was attended by over 100 mathematicians from 13 different countries, including 14 graduate students. The quality of the presentations was uniformly high, and the organisers were pleased about the way the conference created many opportunities for interaction and collaboration. * Visit by Bruce Richter (University of Waterloo, Canada) Professor Bruce Richter is visiting New Zealand for 6 months as part of the NZIMA programme on Combinatorics and its Applications. During his time here he will be working jointly with Paul Bonnington, Jana Siagiova (NZIMA postdoctoral fellow) and Jozef Siran on three separate projects in topological graph theory. In addition, Bruce has been selected as NZ Mathematical Society Visiting Lecturer for 2004, and will be giving lectures at the following universities in coming the weeks: - University of Waikato (Hamilton) 14 September - Massey University (Palmerston North) 17 September - Victoria University of Wellington (Wellington) 21 September - University of Canterbury (Christchurch) 11 October - University of Otago (Dunedin) 14 October. 4. FORTHCOMING CONFERENCES IN THE MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES IN NZ 5-8 September 2004, at Auckland: International Conference on Bioinformatics (including a Symposium on Mathematical Bioinformatics) See: http:://www.incob.org/ 1-3 December 2004, at Leigh: Workshop on Dynamical Systems and Numerical Analysis See: http://www.math.waikato.ac.nz/~rua/dsna.html#events 28-29 November 2004, at Auckland: 39th Annual ORSNZ Conference See: http://www.esc.auckland.ac.nz/Organisations/ORSNZ/conf39/index.html 6-8 December 2004, at Dunedin: 2004 New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium See: http://www.maths.otago.ac.nz/home/department/_deptsection.php? department/conferences/colloquium.html 11-13 December 2004, at Auckland: International Workshop on Automata, Structures and Logic See: https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/wasl2004/ 13-18 December 2004, at Taupo: Conference in Combinatorics and its Applications, in association with the 29th Australasian Conference in Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing (29th ACCMCC) See: http://www.nzima.auckland.ac.nz/combinatorics/conference.html 8-15 January 2005, at Napier: 11th NZMRI Summer Meeting, on Geometry and its interactions with Algebra and Analysis See: http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/Conferences/2005/geometry-program/ nzmri.html 24-28 January 2005, at Auckland: Mathematics-in-Industry Study Group (MISG) 2005 See: http://misg2005.massey.ac.nz 30 January - 3 February 2005, at Napier: Annual meeting of ANZIAM (Australian and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics) See: http://www.math.waikato.ac.nz/anziam05/index.html 14-18 February 2005, at Auckland: International Meeting on Geometry: Interactions with Algebra and Analysis See: http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/Conferences/2005/geometry-program/ auckland.html 29 March - 1 April 2005, at Albany: 14th International Workshop on Matrices and Statistics See: http://iwms2005.massey.ac.nz/ SUBSCRIBING AND UNSUBSCRIBING Please forward this newsletter to any non-subscriber to whom the material may be relevant and who may wish to receive the publication regularly. 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