NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS (NZIMA) Newsletter 13 November 2006 We're pleased to give you another update on news from the mathematical sciences CoRE, the NZIMA. The first issue of our colourful twice-yearly bulletin "NZ-IMAges" was produced in September. We hope you liked it. Congratulations to Rob Goldblatt for his winning suggestion in our competition for the title. If you didn't get a copy and would like to, please let us know! Marston Conder and Vaughan Jones Co-Directors of the NZIMA SUMMARY OF CONTENTS 1. Proposal for CoRE funding 2008-2014 2. Awards and honours 3. Profile: Catherine McCartin 4. New NZIMA programmes for 2007/08 5. New NZIMA postgraduate student projects 6. New initiatives 7. Forthcoming conferences in the mathematical sciences in Oceania 1. PROPOSAL FOR CoRE FUNDING 2008-2014 We have just lodged a proposal to the Centres of Research Excellence Fund for another six year's of CoRE funding, from mid-2008 to mid-2014. We are very grateful to members of our Governing and Advisory Board, our Research Manager (Margaret Woolgrove), and many others, for their helpful contributions to preparing what we believe is a compelling bid. Proposals will be assessed in December/January and short-listed in February, and then site visits will take place for short-listed proposals near the end of March. Decisions will be made by the NZ government (on the basis of advice from the CoRE Selection Committee and the Tertiary Education Commission), and announced by June 2007. 2. AWARDS AND HONOURS Alastair Scott (member of the NZIMA's Governing Board) has won the Waksberg Award from the American Statistical Association and the Statistical Society of Canada, for his work on survey sampling. Andy Philpott (Co-Director of the NZIMA's programme on Mathematical Models for Optimizing Transportation Services) has won the Hans Daellenbach Award from the Operations Research Society of New Zealand. Catherine McCartin (who was involved in the NZIMA's Logic & Computation programme) has won the Royal Society of New Zealand's Hatherton Award for 2006, for the best scientific paper by a PhD student at any New Zealand University. Matt Visser (who has agreed to join us as a principal investigator on the NZIMA's CoRE application) has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Marston Conder (Co-Director of the NZIMA) has been appointed as a member of New Zealand's new 12-person National Science Panel, recently established by the Royal Society of New Zealand. He will also be President of the RSNZ Academy for three years from 1st December. Peter Hunter FRS (member of the NZIMA's Governing Board) has been elected as a member of the RSNZ Academy Council. 3. PROFILE: CATHERINE McCARTIN Dr Catherine McCartin studied for a PhD at Victoria University of Wellington, writing a thesis on parameterized complexity, under the supervision of Rod Downey. Complexity theory deals with the intrinsic difficulty of computational processes, as measured by resources such as time or space or memory needed for computational tasks. Parameterized complexity attempts to understand the complexity of problems by exploiting hidden regularities in the input data. Catherine's thesis made several valuable contributions, including a new (implemented) algorithm for the jump number problem. She won a Fast Start Marsden Fund award in 2004, and was promoted to a Senior Lectureship at Massey University on completion of her PhD (which incidentally she achieved while also helping run a farm and raising three children). This year Catherine won the Hatherton Award of the Royal Society of New Zealand, for the best scientific paper by a PhD student at any New Zealand University. Her paper 'Parameterized counting problems' was published in the prestigious Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, vol. 138 (2006), and lays foundations for the study of questions like how many solutions there are to a problem, and how to enumerate them. 4. NEW NZIMA PROGRAMMES FOR 2007/08 Three new thematic programmes have been developed and selected for support from mid-2007, as follows: Applications of Mathematics in the Nanosciences Director: Dr Shaun Hendy (IRL/MacDiarmid Institute) Starting mid-2007 Algorithms: New Directions and Applications Directors: Prof. Mike Atkinson (University of Otago) and Dr Charles Semple (University of Canterbury) Starting February 2008 Conformal Geometry and its Applications Directors: Assoc. Prof. Rod Gover (University of Auckland) and Prof. Gaven Martin (Massey University) Starting 2008 (with the NZMRI summer meeting in January 2008). We are very grateful to members of our International Scientific Advisory Board for their involvement in helping us select these programmes. We will shortly be calling for proposals for new programmes to commence in 2009, contingent on extension of our CoRE funding. Further details will be available on the NZIMA's website http://www.nzima.org/. 5. NEW NZIMA POSTGRADUATE STUDENT PROJECTS NZIMA postgraduate scholarships have been awarded to five new students for their PhD projects: - Robin Averill, for a PhD in mathematics education (supervised by Megan Clark), Victoria University of Wellington - Maarten Jordens, for a PhD on minimisers of distortion functionals and the calculus of variations (supervised by Gaven Martin), Massey University - Xinshan Li, for a PhD on modelling childbirth (supervised by Poul Nielsen), University of Auckland - Yang Wang, for a PhD on modelling of left ventricular disease using cardiac MRI (supervised by Alistair Young), University of Auckland - Oliver Weide, for a PhD on Integrated crew pairing and aircraft routing (supervised by David Ryan and Matthias Ehrgott), University of Auckland. Robin Averill's project is exploring the importance of effective teacher-student relationships for mathematics learning, especially for Maori and Pacific students. 6. NEW INITIATIVES We are pursuing some new initiatives aimed at greater outreach to the wider community, and improving the inclusion and participation of people from under-represented groups in the mathematical sciences. * DVD and website of mathematical resources Complementing the new "NZ-IMAges" bulletin, we are going ahead with plans to create a website and DVD of mathematical resources for schools (both students and teachers), centred around video-clips of interviews with mathematics graduates and professionals, short documentaries, and other information and useful links regarding maths, its uses, and careers for graduates. We plan to launch the "MathsReach" website and DVD in February/March next year. Please contact Margaret Woolgrove (our Research Manager) if you want to find out more about this. * New projects The NZIMA is major sponsor of a new project called "Pangarau:AIM", designed to trace mathematically achieving Maori students in schools in Northland through their secondary school careers, to understand what makes them continue or discontinue in our subject. This project is being coordinated by Sina Greenwood, Hannah Bartholomew and Colleen McMurchy-Pilkington, from the University of Auckland. We are also sponsoring a pilot study for a project aimed at attracting Samoan students into university education in New Zealand. * Workshop for Women in the Mathematical Sciences in NZ Although there have been increased numbers of very well-qualified women engaging in postgraduate study and research in the mathematical sciences in NZ recently, there are very few women graduates in permanent professional positions, especially at senior levels. The NZIMA is planning to run a 2-day workshop in November 2007 aimed at encouraging women in the mathematical sciences in NZ. This workshop will bring together graduate students, postdoctoral and professional researchers from NZ universities and CRIs, to share research interests and experiences, advice about professional careers in the mathematical sciences, and facilitate mentoring, networking and support. For further details, please contact Vivien Kirk . 7. FORTHCOMING CONFERENCES IN THE MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES IN OCEANIA 4-8 December 2006, in Canberra, Australia: BioInfoSummer2006: ICE-EM Bioinformatics Summer Symposium See http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/events/BioInfoSummer06/ 4-6 December 2006, in Hamilton, NZ: 2006 NZ Mathematics Colloquium See http://www.math.waikato.ac.nz/Coll2006/index.html 8-13 January 2007, in the Bay of Islands, NZ: NZMRI Summer Workshop on Partial Differential Equations: Analysis, Applications and Inverse Problems (NZIMA programme) See http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/~fox/SummerWorkshop.html 15 January - 9 February 2007, at the University of Sydney, Australia: ICE-EM/AMSI Summer School in Mathematics See http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au:80/u/amsiss07/ *Please note* Cost reduction for NZ students as affiliated with the NZIMA 28 January - 1 February 2007, in Fremantle, Western Australia: ANZIAM 2007, annual conference of the professional association for industrial and applied mathematics in Australia and New Zealand See http://www.anziam07.murdoch.edu.au/ 29 January - 2 February 2007, in Fiji: SPM07 Second South Pacific Conference on Mathematics See http://www.riemann.usp.ac.fj/~spcm07/ 5-9 February 2007 at Wollongong, NSW, Australia: MISG-07 Mathematics-in-Industry Study Group 2007. See http://www.misg.math.uow.edu.au/ *Please note* Cost reduction for NZ students as affiliated with the NZIMA 16-20 April 2007, at Hanmer Springs, NZ: NZIMA programme workshop on Modelling Invasive Species and Weed Impact See http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/bio/NZIMA/ 12-15 November 2007, at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ: 1st Joint Meeting of the American and New Zealand Mathematical Societies See http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~mathmeet/amsnzms2007/ 3-7 December 2007, in Dunedin, NZ: 32nd ACCMCC (Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing) See http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/mike/ACCMCC32/32ACCMCC.html 13-17 July 2009, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia: First Pacific Rim Mathematical Congress See http://www.primath.org/ for updates 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. 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