newsletter - New Zealand Mathematical Society

months off. He also experienced reduced bargaining power upon entering a shoe store wearing only socks
on his feet. After the holiday, Shaun spent a week at the Harish Chandra Institute in Allahabad, two
weeks at University of Mysore, and two days at Bangalore University. He was pleased to finally meet
three of his co-authors for the first time.
Paul Cowpertwait says that he is still beavering away at stochastic rainfall modelling; he had a successful
trip to the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, where they plan to implement his algorithms into a
software package for use by engineers throughout Australia. He says :"Why they need a rainfall model
for that barren wasteland over there still beats me! I suppose it just makes my job easier: 00000..."
Mick Roberts spent 25th November to 6th December visiting Geoff Aldis at the University of New South
Wales (ADFA) in Canberra. During this time he was an invited speaker at both the annual ACT ANZIAM
meeting and the Australasian Region Conference of the International Biometric Society, which were both
held at ANU.
Congratulations are due to Jo Mann for her MInfSc with first class honours for her thesis `Modelling
repeated epidemics with general infection kernels' and for her Massey University PhD scholarship.
We said farewell to Paul Bracewell who has left to join OffLode, a Wellington-based Data Mining
company. We wish him all the best for his future career. We welcome our new arrivals in Mathematics
and Statistics: Dr Claire Jordon (Lecturer) (see New Colleagues), Marie Fitch (Senior Tutor) and
Nicoleen Cloete (Tutor). Heung Yeung Lam (Frederick) has also joined the teaching team as a tutor.
Marie Fitch joins the team as a Senior Tutor to assist in particular with the first year statistics teaching.
Marie has plenty of invaluable teaching experience having spent the last 10 years teaching maths and
stats at Corran School (Auckland City), where she was also a careers advisor.
Nicoleen Cloete has taken up a temporary Tutorship in Mathematics until the end of Semester 2, and will
contribute to the teaching programmes in both Mathematics and Statistics. Nicoleen is currently
completing a PhD in stochastic processes and probability theory from the University of Auckland.
Frederick Lam is a familiar face within the institute as he is completing his PhD studies.
On the subject of baby news, Winston Sweatman is enjoying less sleep following the happy arrival of son
Iain.
Visitors
James Wallace from Bradford University, England, visited Tasos Tsoularis in March for research
collaboration.
Seminars
Horst Hamacher (Technical University of Klauserlauten), "Consecutive-1 Matrix Decomposition of
Integer Matrices and Applications."
Shaun Cooper, "Confessions of a Mathematician."
Claire A. Jordan, "Bayesian Classification using Product Partition Models."
Institute of Information Sciences and Technology
Statistics
Winston Sweatman
The Massey statisticians at Palmerston North have finally relocated from the Social Sciences Tower to the
AgHort Building, thereby joining the computer scientists and information engineers who make up the rest
of our Institute. Our arrival coincided with that of our new Head of Institute Professor Janina Mazierska,
formerly of James Cook University in Australia. The week before the start of the first semester saw us
frantically packing and unpacking boxes while simultaneously trying to prepare for a new academic year.
The drama of the occasion was heightened by the floods and high winds which hit the Manawatu at this
time. Ganesh's house came closest to being flooded, but his vantage point near the swollen river did
enable him to take some stunning photographs of cows swimming to safety, which later appeared in the
local newspaper.
Steve Haslett managed to avoid the trauma of moving by the simple expedient of being somewhere else,
although as the "somewhere else" in this case was Dhaka it might have been less traumatic staying here.