newsletter - New Zealand Mathematical Society

The MISG (Mathematics in Industry Study Group) was held here on 26 –30 January 2004. Several
industry groups brought along problems for which mathematics may be useful, and the members of the
group presented helpful ideas about those problems.
On February 5 and 6 the Department of Mathematics, together with the Department of Economics, hosted
an International Workshop on Game Theory and Social Choice. The invited speakers at this workshop
were: Robert Aumann (Jerusalem), Herve Moulin (Rice), Anna Bogomolnaia (Rice) and Murali Agastya
(Sydney). The local participants included Andy Philpott (Engineering), Ilze Ziedins & Geoff Pritchard
(Statistics), John Hillas (Economics), Marston Conder, John McCabe-Dansted, Simon Marshall and
Arkadii Slinko (Mathematics).
The 7th Devonport Topology Festival was held on February 13. The scheduled speakers were: Jiling Cao
on "Semitopological groups," David Gauld on "Continuity and differentiability," Chris Good on
"Monotonizations of countable paracompactness," Mark Harmer on "Spectral properties of the triangle
groups," Vladimir Pestov on "Oscillation stability in topological groups," and Grant Woods on
"One-point metric extensions and zero-sets of Stone-Cech."
John Butcher and Helmut Podhaisky attended the ANZIAM Conference at Hobart, in January –February.
David Gauld was on leave in December and January, concentrating on research with Frederic Mynard
(University of Mississippi). David Alcorn was the Acting Head of Department—except for the first week
of January when he was at Nelson, and Mike Thomas was then the Acting Acting Head.
Norm Levenberg attended the Oberwolfach meeting on Funktionentheorie in February.
Geoff Nicholls has a Visiting Associate Professorship in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the
University of Aalborg, Denmark, from March to June 2004.
Recent visitors include: Professor Len Bos (University of Calgary), Professor John Conway (Princeton
University), Dr John Crisp (Université de Bourgogne), Professor Carl de Boor (University of Wisconsin-
Madison), Dr Stefano De Marchi (University of Verona), Dr Charles Eaton (UMIST), Dr Ruhana Even
(Weizmann Institute), Professor Hershel Farkas (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Associate Professor
Valentin Gutev (Kwazulu-Natal University), Dr George Havas (University of Queensland), Professor
Zdzislaw Jackiewicz (Arizona State University), Dr Ville Kolehmainen (Kuopio University, Finland),
Professor Burkhard Kuelshammer (Jena University), Dr Hendrik Lenstra (Leiden), Professor Dany
Leviatan (Tel Aviv University), Dr Steve Linton (St Andrews University), Associate Professor Kevin
McLeod (University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee), Professor Herve Moulin (Rice University), Professor
Peter Neumann (Oxford University), Professor Mike Newman (ANU), Professor Allan Pinkus (Technion,
Haifa), Professor Zbigniew Piotrowski (Youngstown State University, Ohio), Dr Cheryl Praeger (UWA),
Professor Robert Raphael (Concordia University, Canada), Steffen Schulz (Humboldt University, Berlin),
Dr Akos Seress (Ohio State University), Professor Charles Sims (Rutgers University), Dr Gustav
Söderlind (Lund University), Dr Caren Tischendorf (Humboldt University, Berlin), Dr Marco Vianello
(University of Padua), Professor Grant Woods (University of Manitoba), Dr Will Wright (Université de
Genéve), and Professor Zvi Ziegler (Technion, Haifa).
The University's Graduate Research Fund has awarded grants to the following doctoral students in our
Department:
Willy Alangui (& supervisor Bill Barton), "Rice terracing practice in Philippine indigenous communities:
an ethnomathematical investigation," $2750.
Debasish Roy (& supervisor Geoff Nicholls), "Simulation-based methods in Bayesian inference for
physical inverse problems," $3000.
Shehenaz Adam (& supervisor Bill Barton), "Ethnomathematics in the Maldivian curriculum," $2750 .
Jamie Sneddon received a PhD for his thesis on "Minors and Planar Embeddings of Digraphs,"
supervised by Paul Bonnington and Marston Conder.
Seminars
Professor Szymon Dolecki (Université de Bourgogne), "Convergence theory: convenient abstraction
level."
Dr Melissa Rodd (University of Leeds), "Ways ahead: successful mathematics students at two
universities."