NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS (NZIMA) Newsletter 22 February 2009 Here's a further update on news from the NZIMA, the mathematical sciences CoRE. The sixth issue of our colourful twice-yearly bulletin "NZ-IMAges" is being prepared, and should appear in April. We'll give an update on NZIMA programmes in our next e-newsletter, in May. Marston Conder and Vaughan Jones Co-Directors of the NZIMA SUMMARY OF CONTENTS 1. Peter Hunter wins "World Class New Zealand" Award 2. Recent events sponsored by the NZIMA 3. Bereavement: Keith Worsley 4. More awards and honours 5. Forthcoming events in the mathematical sciences in NZ 1. PETER HUNTER WINS "WORLD CLASS NEW ZEALAND" AWARD Professor Peter Hunter (Director of the Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland, and a principal investigator in the NZIMA) has won this year's "World Class New Zealand" Award, in the Research, Science, Technology & Academia category. These awards, presented by KEA New Zealand (Kiwi Expats Assn) and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, celebrate some of New Zealand's tallest poppies. Peter Hunter is an outstanding and visionary scientist who has pioneered much of the application of principles and techniques from mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to questions in medicine and biology, such as: What happens when blood flow to the human heart is blocked and the heart goes into cardiac arrest? How can problems of the stomach and intestines be detected without major invasive surgery? How do athletes stress their joints, such as knees, and how can this be prevented? Peter is achieving a dream of being able to model and analyse the entire human body using the bioengineering approach. His early work put him and his team at the world forefront of cardiac modeling, and one notable feature was that Peter made both the heart model and associated software freely available to the entire research community. This work has grown and expanded over the last 25 years, and Peter's recognition of the need to incorporate sub-cellular activity into models of whole organ function helped put him into the chairperson role of the "Physiome" project, a worldwide public effort to provide a computational framework for understanding human physiology, commissioned by the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS). Peter will receive his award at a gala dinner to be held in April. 2. RECENT EVENTS SPONSORED BY THE NZIMA * New Zealand Mathematics and Statistics Postgraduate (NZMASP) Conference The second New Zealand Mathematics & Statistics Postgraduate Students Conference was held at Whitianga, for three days in November 2008. This attracted 63 postgraduate students, from all over New Zealand, and the talks they presented on their research spanned a diverse range of topics, from representation theory to queueing theory, and phylogenetics to topology. Mareike Fischer (University of Canterbury) won the NZIMA's Best Presentation award, for her talk on "Why DNA sequences can be perfectly misleading", and Peter Humphries (University of Canterbury) won the Peoples' Choice Award (sponsored by Hoare Research Software) for his talk on "Nesting polynomials in infinite radicals". The meeting was organised by Howard Cohl and Alethea Rea (University of Auckland), with help from Haydn Cooper, Maarten Jordens and Dion O'Neale (Massey University), Beata Faller (University of Canterbury) and Lyndon Walker (University of Auckland). * Workshop for women researchers in the mathematical sciences A half-day workshop for women researchers in the mathematical sciences was held at the University of Canterbury in December, preceding the 7th Australia New Zealand Mathematics Convention. There were 25 participants, of whom 17 were PhD students and the rest were mostly earlier career researchers. The workshop (organised by Vivien Kirk (University of Auckland) and Alex James and Clemency Montelle (University of Canterbury) on behalf of the NZIMA) was based around two formal sessions, one on "Surviving a Conference" (presented by Vivien Kirk and Ilze Ziedins) and the other a presentation by Dr Susan Timmins from the Department of Conservation about her experiences as a professional scientist in NZ. In addition, the workshop included activities that provided a basis for informal networking and mentoring. The workshop was appreciated by the participants, and has clearly helped young women mathematicians establish a community for themselves within the larger mathematical world. It has also provided a good example for a similar workshop for women now being organised for the next annual meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society. * 7th Australia New Zealand Mathematics Convention The NZIMA sponsored the 7th Australia New Zealand Mathematics Convention, held at the University of Canterbury, during the week 8-12 December 2008. This event, in a series of joint conferences held every four years, attracted 303 participants (to our knowledge, the largest ever meeting of mathematicians in New Zealand). The programme featured 10 plenary lectures, and approximately 250 other presentations, in 16 special sessions. The Convention was a spectacular success: the research of New Zealand mathematical scientists was showcased to an international audience, and world-class plenary lecturers spoke about exciting new developments in their subjects. It was particularly pleasing to see New Zealand students winning the both local and Australian prizes for best student presentations. * 4th ICC meeting The 4th International Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing (4-ICC) took place at the University of Auckland, the week 15-19 December 2008. The ICC is held every ten years, as a complement to the cycle of annual ACCMCC meetings (in Australia and New Zealand). This one attracted 100 participants from 20 countries, including several research students from NZ and Australia. The programme featured 11 high quality plenary lectures, and 70 contributed talks in two parallel sessions. Topics covered applied areas such as phylogenetics and statistical physics, through to basic questions in enumeration, random and structural graph theory, and design theory. The meeting was organised by Mark Wilson (University of Auckland) with help from Charles Little (Massey), Alex Raichev and Michael Dinneen (Auckland). Videos of the excellent plenary lectures can be seen on the conference website http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/research/groups/theory/4ICC/. * Annual NZIMA/NZMRI Summer meeting This year's summer meeting took place at Napier, 4-9 January, with the theme of algorithmic information theory, computability and complexity. The organisers were Rod Downey and Noam Greenberg (Victoria University of Wellington). Instructional lecture courses were given as follows: - Denis Hirschfeldt (Chicago), algorithmic randomness, - Ted Slaman (Berkeley), never continuously random reals, - Eric Allender (Rutgers), derandomisation in complexity classes - Alexander Kechris (Caltech), descriptive set theory, and - Michael Yampolsky (Toronto) on computability of Julia sets. The talks were entertaining and captivating, and presented material from the forefront of research not hitherto presented in New Zealand. About 50 participants, among them more than 20 students, also enjoyed a summery warm week in Hawke's bay, including a walk up to Sunrise Hut in the Ruahine range, guided by David Gauld. * Workshop on Energy, Wind and Water A four-day workshop on mathematical methods was held in Auckland the week 9-12 February 2009, as part of the NZIMA's new programme on "Energy, Wind and Water". The workshop involved a blend of fairly mathematical topics and general presentations on tidal energy, oil and gas reservoirs, wind energy, modeling New Zealand's energy economy and bio-energy. The main mathematical themes were model calibration and model reduction, with application to geothermal reservoirs, groundwater and aerodynamics. Invited speakers were Omar Ghattas (Texas), Bart van Bloemen Waanders (Sandia National Laboratory), Max Gunzburger (Florida), Karen Willcox (MIT), George Zyvoloski (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Stefan Finsterle (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Margot Gerritsen (Stanford), Julie Young (Princeton), Andrew Pollard (Queens University), and Joaquim Martins (Toronto). The Workshop was attended by over 50 people, including 13 students, and stimulated several international research collaborations. 3. BEREAVEMENT: KEITH WORSLEY With much sadness we report on the death of Professor Keith Worsley, a New Zealand educated statistician and member of our International Scientific Advisory Board. Keith discovered he had pancreatic cancer only three months ago, and died on 27th February at the age of only 57. During his career Keith made significant contributions both to statistical theory and its applications, most importantly in the field of human brain mapping. His main research was concerned with smooth random fields which, for example, serve as models for the data collected by neuroscientists using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) or Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). His work focused on inferential questions to determine which areas of the human brain are active while subjects perform a given task. His approach to these questions involved an innovative mix of probability theory, statistics and geometry. In his work on the maxima of smooth random fields, he uncovered elegant connections between smooth random fields and classical integral geometry. A graduate of the University of Auckland (PhD 1978), he spent much of his career at McGill University (Montreal) before moving to the University of Chicago in 2008. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, received the Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada in 2004, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ in 2008. 4. MORE AWARDS AND HONOURS * Andy Philpott's team in finals of 2009 Franz Edelman Competition Andy Philpott, one of our principal investigators (and Co-Director of our programme on Mathematical Models for Optimizing Transportation Services), is a member of the 3-person Norske Skog team that is one of six finalists in the 2009 Franz Edelman contest. This team has been nominated for the pivotal and highly effective role they have given Operations Research in achieving improved profitability. * Oxford chair for Nic Smith Nic Smith, who was Director of one of our very first programmes, on Modelling Cellular Function, has been appointed Professor of Computational Physiology at the University of Oxford. This is a remarkable achievement for someone under the age of 40. (It is also a loss for New Zealand, but we can hope that he will be attracted back some time in the future.) * Peter Hunter appointed chair of the Marsden Fund Council Peter Hunter (see item 1 above) has been appointed by the Minister of Research, Science & Technology) as the new chair of the Marsden Fund Council. Peter served as a member of this council and convenor of its Mathematical & Information Sciences Panel from 2005 to 2008. 5. FORTHCOMING EVENTS IN THE MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES IN NZ 17 March 2009, University of Auckland: Public lecture by Bernard Chazelle (Princeton University), on Algorithms See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/news/index.php?item=429 6-10 July 2009, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia: First Pacific Rim Mathematical Congress See http://www.primath.org/prima2009/ 29 September - 2 October 2009, at Palmerston North: Biennial Conference of the NZ Association of Mathematics Teachers "Pi in the Sky: Extending Mathematical Horizons" (NZAMT11) See http://www.nzamt.org.nz/nzamt11/ 8-10 December 2010, at Albany (North Shore City): Annual NZ Mathematics Colloquium, Massey University's Albany Campus Further details awaited 3-10 January 2010, at Hanmer Springs: Annual NZMRI/NZIMA Summer Meeting, this time with the theme of "Groups, Representations and Number Theory" See http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/wiki/2010_NZMRI_Summer_Workshop Details of the annual meetings of the NZSA and ORSNZ for 2009 are not yet available but will be published later in the year.