NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS (NZIMA) Newsletter 6 February 2005 Welcome to the sixth 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 interesting and informative. Marston Conder and Vaughan Jones Co-Directors of the NZIMA SUMMARY OF CONTENTS 1. Conference in honour of Alastair Scott 2. Other news 3. Recent NZIMA-sponsored events 4. Forthcoming conferences in the mathematical sciences in NZ 5. Forthcoming conferences in the mathematical sciences elsewhere 1. CONFERENCE IN HONOUR OF ALASTAIR SCOTT Leading international statisticians will gather in Auckland in mid- April at a conference to celebrate the career of one of New Zealand's foremost mathematical scientists, Professor Alastair Scott, and to advance research in areas where he has made his greatest contribution. The conference will address problems which are important in many areas of scientific inquiry, and will bring to New Zealand the largest concentration of first-rank international statisticians together in one place at one time for a considerable period. Alastair Scott, who is retiring this year, was founding head of the University of Auckland's Department of Statistics (and previously Head of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics for some years). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and one of only four honorary life members of the New Zealand Statistical Association. His 1981 paper with JNK Rao, published in the Journal of American Statistical Association, was selected as one of 19 landmark papers in the history of survey sampling for the 2001 centenary volume of the International Association of Survey Statisticians. 2. OTHER NEWS * "Porridge, Pulleys and Pi" This MSRI video gives a portrait of Vaughan Jones (Co-Director of the NZIMA) and Hendrik Lenstra, offering insights to their work, their backgrounds, their personalities and interests, and some of the impact of their research in mathematics, physics, cryptography and molecular biology. The NZIMA has purchased copies of this video and will be donating them to NZ university Mathematics departments. * Interaction with Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) In February, NZIMA Co-Directors Marston Conder and Vaughan Jones met with the Director (Garth Gaudry) and Executive Officer (Jan Thomas) of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI), and discussed possibilities for closer interaction between their institutes. * Distinctions, Appointments, etc. Marston Conder (NZIMA Co-Director) has been made an Honorary Life Member of the NZ Mathematical Society, and was awarded one of the University of Auckland's inaugural Hood Fellowships in December 2004. Rod Downey (Maclaurin Fellow for 2003) has been elected a Fellow of the New Zealand Mathematical Society. Rob Goldblatt (Director of the NZIMA's Programme in Logic and Computation) has been made an Honorary Life Member of the NZ Mathematical Society, and has been appointed Coordinating Editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova (NZIMA scholar) has been appointed to a postdoctoral fellowship at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), to work in the Laboratory of Biological Modelling, Washington DC. 3. RECENT NZIMA-SPONSORED EVENTS * NZIMA Workshop on Dynamical Systems and Numerical Analysis This was a follow-up workshop to the main conference held in Raglan in August 2004, and took place in December at the University of Auckland's Leigh Marine Laboratory. A total of 32 people attended the meeting, with 11 from Australia, the UK and USA. Plenary talks were given by Professors Jerrold Marsden (Caltech), Jeroen Lamb (Imperial College) and Robert McLachlan (Massey University). * International Workshop on Automata Structures and Logic This was held at the University of Auckland in December, and attracted some of top researchers in the areas of logic, theoretical computer science and complexity, including Professors Anil Nerode (Cornell), Colin Stirling (Edinburugh), Rick Thomas (Leicester), Damian Niwinski (Warsaw), Bruno Courcelle (Bordeaux), Jaques Sakarovitch (Paris) and Rod Downey (Wellington). * NZIMA Conference on Combinatorics and its Applications This was held at Taupo in December, jointly with the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia (CMSA)'s 29th Australasian Conference in Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing. The meeting was a great success, and widely regarded the most significant international event in combinatorics for 2004, as well as being the largest pure mathematics conference to be held in New Zealand since 1978. The main invited speakers were outstanding: Dan Archdeacon (Vermont), Rosemary Bailey (London), Richard Brualdi (Wisconsin), Darryn Bryant (Queensland), Peter Cameron (London), Maria Chudnovsky (Princeton), Bruno Courcelle (Bordeaux), Jim Geelen (Waterloo), Bert Gerards (CWI/Eindhoven), Catherine Greenhill (UNSW), Bojan Mohar (Ljubljana), Bruce Richter (Waterloo), Neil Robertson (Ohio State), Paul Seymour (Princeton), Alan Sokal (New York), Robin Thomas (Georgia Tech), Carsten Thomassen (Denmark), Tom Tucker (New York), Mark Watkins (Syracuse), and Dominic Welsh (Oxford). Over 150 participants from 19 countries took part, including 39 students and other researchers from NZ. * NZMRI Summer Meeting This was held at Napier in January, as part of the NZIMA's programme "Geometry: Interactions with Algebra and Analysis". The five principal speakers were Ben Andrews (Canberra), Craig Evans (Berkeley), Martin Liebeck (Imperial College), Alex Lubotzky (Jerusalem), and Peter Sarnak (Princeton), each of whom delivered a series of three lectures. The meeting also celebrated the upcoming 80th birthday of Fred Gehring, with a series of special lectures on one day of the workshop. The meeting was very successful, attracting 75 participants, including approximately 40 students. One of the many highlights were a public lecture by John Conway (Princeton) on "Beating children at their own games", and the course of lectures by Ben Andrews on Perelman's recent proof of the Poincare conjecture. * Public lecture by John Conway (Princeton) Following the NZMRI meeting at Napier, John Conway visited Auckland for two weeks, and on 27th January he gave a public lecture to an audience of about 300, titled "The Free-Will Theorem". This was a fascinating account of joint work with his colleague, Simon Kochen (Princeton), taking three basic axioms about the universe and proving that as a consequence of these, it must be true that if one person has free will, then particles in the universe must have it too. Conway's lecture generated considerable media publicity for mathematics, attracting radio interviews and newspaper articles. * NZIMA Conference on Geometry: Interactions with Algebra and Analysis This was held in Auckland in February, and attracted approximately 75 participants, including over 25 students. The conference featured 18 one-hour invited lectures, given by speakers from Australia, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK and the US, plus many 30-minute contributions. The theme was interpreted broadly, so the subjects of lectures included representation theory, profinite groups, word-hyperbolic groups, and projective planes. 4. FORTHCOMING CONFERENCES IN THE MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES IN NZ 29 March - 1 April 2005, at Albany (North Shore City): 14th International Workshop on Matrices and Statistics See: http://iwms2005.massey.ac.nz/ 13 - 14 April 2005, in Auckland: Complex sampling, retrospective sampling and missing data - a conference in honour of Alastair Scott See: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/iass55/ 19 - 22 April 2005, in Auckland: Mathematical Models for Optimizing Transportation Services. See: http://www.esc.auckland.ac.nz/Transportation/ 29 June - 1 July 2005, at Wanaka: Hidden Markov Models and Complex Systems Workshop See: http://nzsa.rsnz.org/HMM1/index.htm 4-6 July 2005, in Dunedin: Annual Conference of the NZ Statistical Association See: http://www.maths.otago.ac.nz/nzsa2005/home.php 27 - 30 September 2005, in Christchurch: "Thinking Outside the Square", 9th Biennial New Zealand Association of Mathematics Teachers conference See: http://www.nzamt9.org.nz/ 5 - 7 December 2005, at Palmerston North: 2005 NZ Mathematics Colloquium (and AGM of the NZ Math Society) Website to be advised 8 - 15 January 2006, at Omapere: NZMRI Summer Meeting, on Geometric Methods in the Topology of 3-Dimensional Manifolds Website to be advised 5. FORTHCOMING CONFERENCES IN THE MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES ELSEWHERE 22 - 27 July 2005, in Canberra, Australia: CMA/AMSI Instructional Program in Noncummutative Geometry and Index Theory See: http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/events/ngit05/ 28 July - 1 August 2005, in Canberra, Australia: CMA/AMSI Workshop on Noncummutative Geometry and Index Theory See: http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/events/ngit05/ [The website has details of potential support for students] 22 - 26 Nov 2005, on Fraser Island, Queensland, Australia: DELTA 2005, the 5th Southern Hemisphere Symposium on Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics Teaching and Learning. See: http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/delta05/index.php SUBSCRIBING AND UNSUBSCRIBING Please forward this NZIMA newsletter to any non-subscriber to whom the material may be relevant and who may wish to receive the publication regularly. To join or to have your name removed from the mailing list, just send an email to