NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS (NZIMA) Newsletter 10 February 2006 This is the tenth 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. Student winners of 2005 Aitken Prize 2. Special issue of journal from Logic & Computation Programme 3. Recent events sponsored by the NZIMA 4. Pacific Rim Mathematical Association (PRIMA) 5. Other news 6. Forthcoming conferences in the mathematical sciences in NZ 1. STUDENT WINNERS OF THE 2005 AITKEN PRIZE The 2005 Aitken Prize for best student talk at the NZ Mathematics Colloquium (in December 2005) was awarded jointly to two students engaged in the NZIMA's programme on Dynamical Systems: Elan Gin (University of Auckland) for her talk "Calcium waves and buffers", and Amanda Elvin (Massey University) for her talk "The role of gap junctions in a neural field model". Also Dion O'Neale (another participant in Dynamical Systems programme) was given an honourable mention for his talk "Geometric integration for a two spin system". 2. SPECIAL ISSUE OF JOURNAL FROM LOGIC & COMPUTATION PROGRAMME A special issue of the journal "Annals of Pure and Applied Logic" is being published by Elsevier, as part of the NZIMA's programme in Logic and Computation. This will appear as Volume 38 of the journal in March 2006, with guest editors Rod Downey and Rob Goldblatt (Victoria University of Wellington). 3. RECENT EVENTS SPONSORED BY THE NZIMA *IWMS 2005* The 14th International Workshop in Matrices and Statistics was held at Massey University's Albany Campus from 29th March to 1st April 2005. The workshop was honoured by a Plenary talk by Prof. Calyampudi R Rao, and other plenary talks were given by Professors Shayle Searle (Cornell), Eugene Seneta (Sydney) and George Seber (Auckland). The workshop included 19 invited lectures, 13 contributed papers and 48 participants from 14 different countries (NZ, Australia, Canada, China, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Spain, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the USA). *Conference on Sampling & Missing Data* A conference on "Sampling and Missing Data" was held in Auckland in April 2005 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 addressed problems which are important in many areas of scientific inquiry, and brought together in New Zealand the largest concentration of first-rank international statisticians in one place at one time for a considerable period. *Workshop on Dynamical Systems* A one-day workshop on Dynamical Systems was held in December 2005 as a special session of the 2005 New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium, at Massey University's Palmerston North campus. In fact 22 of the Colloquium's 55 speakers requested to join the latter special session. Also the Aitken Prize for the best student talk at the Colloquium was awarded jointly to two of the session’s student speakers - see above. *Workshops on Hidden Markov Models* Two workshops were held in 2005 as part of the NZIMA's programme on Hidden Markov Models: one in Wanaka (at the end of June and early July), and another in Wellington (in December 2005). Also a seminar series was organised through the Victoria University of Wellington's School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, during the 3-month period August to October 2005. *Visit by Peter Kuchment* Professor Peter Kuchment (Texas A&M University) visited NZ in December 2005. Professor Kuchment is an expert on quantum graphs, a rapidly growing subject on the border between the theory of differential operators, combinatorics and mathematical physics. He gave an invited lecture at the 2005 NZ Mathematics 'Colloquium, and another lecture at the University of Auckland, where he interacted with Professor Boris Pavlov and colleagues. *NZMRI Summer Meeting* Another highly successful summer meeting was held in January 2006, this one as part of the NZIMA's latest programme "Geometric Methods in the Topology of 3-Manifolds", at Taipa (Doubtless Bay, Northland). Some excellent short courses of lectures were given by world experts in the field, including Ian Agol (Illinois at Chicago), Jeff Cheeger (Courant Institute, NY), John Conway (Princeton), Michael Freedman (Microsoft), Cameron Gordon (Austin, Texas), Dale Rolfsen (UBC), Hyam Rubenstein (Melbourne) and Kevin Walker (Microsoft). The workshop was attended by over 70 people, including 19 students. A highlight for participants was hearing the very latest developments on the proof of the Poincare conjecture. *Public Lecture by John Conway* The NZIMA sponsored a public lecture by its Visiting Maclaurin Fellow, John Conway FRS (who is John von Neumann Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, and one of the world's most illustrious mathematicians). John entertained a large audience with his lecture on "Tangles, bangles and knots". He will visit New Zealand again in January 2007 and January 2008. 4. PACIFIC RIM MATHEMATICAL ASSOCIATION The NZIMA is one of the founding members of the (new) Pacific Rim Mathematical Association (otherwise known as 'PRIMA'), set up at the end of 2005 with the aim of promoting and facilitating the development of the mathematical sciences throughout the Pacific Rim region. More information about PRIMA and its intended activities can be found on its website http://www.primath.org/ 5. OTHER NEWS Rob Goldblatt (Director of the NZIMA's Programme in Logic and Computation) has been appointed Coordinating Editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Gaven Martin (a member of the NZIMA's Governing Board and Co-Director of the NZIMA's Geometry programme) has been appointed Managing Editor of the American Mathematical Society's journal "Conformal Geometry and Dynamics", and elected President of the NZ Mathematical Society for a 2-year term. Robert McLachlan (Maclaurin Fellow and Director of the NZIMA's programme 'on Dynamical Systems) won the Massey University Research Medal for 2005. 6. FORTHCOMING EVENTS IN THE MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES IN NZ 22-24 March 2006, at Leigh: Workshop on Non-Standard Techniques in Low Dimensional Topology Contact David Gauld for more information 27 March 2006, at Massey University's Albany campus: 2006 Sir Neil Waters Distinguished Lecture. Public Lecture by NZIMA co-director Vaughan Jones, "Romancing the commutator" See: http://ifs.massey.ac.nz/events.shtml 30 March 2006, at Palmerston North Boys High School: 2006 Sir Neil Waters Distinguished Lecture. Public Lecture by NZIMA co-director Vaughan Jones, "Romancing the commutator" See: http://ifs.massey.ac.nz/events.shtml 3-7 July 2006, at Sky City, Auckland Joint Conference of the Statistical Society of Australia and the New Zealand Statistical Association (ASC/NZSA 2006) See: http://www.statsnz2006.com/ 10-14 July 2006, in Rotorua International Conference on Analytic Topology and Applications See: http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/~cao/conference06.html 16-20 April 2007, at Hanmer Springs: Workshop on Modelling Invasive Species and Weed Impact See http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/bio/NZIMA/ 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