Dr Georgy Gimel'farb has taken up his position as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Auckland (Tamaki Campus). His areas of research are probabilistic models and optimization techniques in image processing and computer vision. Recent results have been found for Gibbs random fields with multiple pairwise interactions (analytic and stochastic approximation of the interaction structure and strengths to simulate, retrieve and segment image textures) and on symmetric dynamic programming algorithms to retrieve 3D optical surfaces from stereo pairs.
Dr Gimel'farb received his MSc degree in Computing and Mathematical Devices from Kiev Polytechnical University (Ukraine) in 1962, a PhD in Engineering Cybernetics from the Institute of Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine in 1969, and a DSc in Control Engineering Systems from the Higher Certifying Commission of the USSR (Moscow) in 1991.
He was a Leading Research Fellow of the Image Recognition Department of the Institute of Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, an invited Professor in medical image analysis at Kiev National University (Ukraine, 1991-1994), and he has worked as an invited researcher at the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1994-1995), Michigan State University (1994), University of Washington (1995-1996), University of Pennsylvania (1996), University of Bonn (1996) and at the National Reseach Centre for Informatics and Automatics (France, 1997).
At the Graduation Ceremony in September 1998, Elena Calude graduated as Ph.D. for her thesis on ``Automata - Theoretical Models for Computational Complexity'', and Asat Arslanov graduated as Ph.D. for his thesis on ``Topics in Algorithmic Information Theory''.
Several conferences on Computer Science will he held here in January 1999. A notice of those conferences is published separately in this Newsletter.
A notice is published elsewhere in this Newsletter, about the International Symposium to honour John Butcher on his retirement.
Also, a notice is published separately about the Mathematics Summer Workshop, to be held at Raglan in January 1999.
Dr John Fauvel (Open University) gave two seminars here, as the 1998 NZMS Visitor. For the second seminar, John Fauvel had brought transparencies of pages from two major mathematical books published by Oxford University Press: John Wallis ``A Treatise On Algebra'' (1685) and David Gregory's edition of Euclid's ``Opera Omnia'' in Greek and Latin (1703). He was astonished and delighted to be handed copies of both folio volumes, borrowed from our Library, for him to display at the seminar.
In August, Bill Barton was an invited Plenary Speaker at the First International Conference on Ethnomathematics at Granada, and in September he attended the Mathematics Education and Society conference at Nottingham. Colin Fox spent 3 weeks on the Ross Sea ice shelf, continuing his study of its break-up.
The Mathematics Education Unit has undergone an offical university review, with Prof. Gilah Leder (LaTrobe University), Prof. Kaye Stacey (University of Melbourne) and Prof. David Ryan (Department of Engineering Science) as the review panel. On November 7 we utilized the presence of Gilah Leder and Kaye Stacey by holding the LOGOS #4 conference on ``Graduate Supervision in Mathematics eDucation'', which attracted participants from VUW, Massey University, Waikato University and ACE, as well as local people.
Prof. Manfred Trummer (Simon Fraser University, B.C.) is on leave at Tamaki Campus, where he teaches part of the numerical analysis paper 445.267. Prof. Charles Leedham-Green (Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London) is visiting until September 1999: his interests are in group theory and computational algebra. He has given here the 1998 Aldis Lecture here, on ``William Steadman Aldis: Senior Wrangler and first Smith's Prizeman''. Prof. Volker Mayer of the University of Lille (France) visited Gaven Martin: his research interests include quasiregular mappings and multidimensional dynamics. Prof. Hiroshi Yamaguchi (Shiga University) visited Norm Levenberg: his research interests are in potential theory and several complex variables. Prof. Chaitan Gupta (University of Nevada - Reno) visited for three weeks: he works on ordinary differential equations, and three-point boundary value problems are a current topic. Prof. Sergey Naboko (St Petersburg University) is visiting Boris Pavlov: he works in mathematical physics, system theory and operator theory.
John Butcher supervized both Tina Chan and her husband David Chen for their Ph.D. studies. Tina completed her Ph.D. early in July with her thesis on ``Structures for the Analysis of Numerical Methods '', and a few weeks later David completed his Ph.D. with his thesis on ``The Effective Order of Singly-Implicit Methods for Stiff Differential Equations''. Tina and David have returned to their academic positions in Taiwan. Alastair McNaughton has completed his Ph.D., with his thesis on ``Long-term scheduling of harvesting with adjacency and trigger constraints''.
Dr Shayne Waldron has recently taken up a Lectureship in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Auckland.
Shayne received a BSc(Hons) in mathematics from the University of Canterbury, and he was a Fulbright Scholar to the United States where he obtained a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the direction of Prof. Carl de Boor. Subsequently he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technion (Haifa), supported by the Israel Council for Higher Education.
His primary research interest is approximation theory, and its connections with numerical analysis and linear algebra. Recent work has involved classical inequalities (Hardy, Schmidt, Wirtinger), and multivariate polynomial interpolation schemes (Kergin, the least). Along with the other members of the New Zealand Approximation Theory Group, he hopes to increase the profile of New Zealand within the approximation theory community through a number of events and visitors to New Zealand, including the forthcoming conference on ``Surface Approximation and Visualisation'', to be held at the University of Canterbury in February 1999.
Congratulations to Professor George Seber, who has recently won a Distinguished Statistical Ecologist Award. This award is presented every four years by the International Association for Ecology, to people who work in the field of Statistical Ecology. George will be working here part-time, after the end of this year.
Renate Meyer and Russell Millar are currently on leave at Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia), and David Scott is on leave at the University of Melbourne. Ross Ihaka attended the ``Interface '98 Conference'' at Minneapolis (May 1998) and the ``Statistical Science and the Internet'' conference at New Jersey (July 1998).
In 1999, Ross will attend a jamboree at Vienna, the ``Interface '99 Conference'', a meeting of the Omega group, and he will visit Wisconsin. Robert Gentlemen will be on leave next year in Boston, visiting the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard and the Dana Farber Cancer Center.
Dr Stephanie Budgett will return to England at the end of the year, with her husband and their New Zealand-born daughter Laura.
Dr Katrina Sharples (University of Otago) is currently visiting, and is working with Robert Gentleman. Prof. Jack Kalbfleisch (University of Waterloo) is currently working with Chris Wild and Alistair Scott. Duncan Temple Lang (Bell Laboratories) is visiting in November, to work on R with Robert Gentlemen and Ross Ihaka. Bjarke Klein and Claus Dethlefsen, graduate students at Aalborg University (Denmark), are currently visiting.
Alain Vandal and Andrew Balemi have completed their Ph.D. degrees.
Lovina McMurchy has won the Frank Knox Fellowship, to do an MBA at Harvard in 1999.
Mats Gustafsson, a doctoral student at the University of Lund in Sweden is visiting the department for two months. The department is also enjoying visits from Dr Mark Nelson and Dr Judith Cederberg.
The 1999 New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium is currently scheduled for 7-9th of July 1999 at the University of Canterbury.
An international workshop on mathematics related to evolutionary genetics is being held on March 1 to 5 1999. The workshop is called ``Kaikoura99'' and already has about 50 participants, half of whom come from overseas, including Professor Andreas Dress. For further information contact Dr Mike Steel or see our web page at: http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/kaikoura2.html Chris Price
Professor Wilf Malcolm was previously Professor of Pure Mathematics at Victoria University of Wellington 1973-84, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Waikato 1985-94. Many readers will know of Wilf's contributions especially in the teaching of mathematics and in the promotion of mathematical logic at Victoria University.. He is attending the 1999 NZ Mathematics Colloquium at the University of Canterbury on 6-9th July 1999 as an invited speaker. We look forward to hearing more from him then. Graeme Wake
In July, Roger Young went to Xi'an, China to transfer reservoir engineering technology as part of a project on the Nagqu geothermal energy development. Warwick Kissling and John Burnell appeared as expert witness in an Environment Court hearing on the Rotorua Geothermal Field. Kit Withers visited the Universities of Unellez and Plymouth
A one day meeting on our deposition was held at Applied Maths, attendees included Rick Sibson and Julie Rowlands from Otago, Bob Braithewaite, Hugh Bibby and George Grindley from IGNS and five Applied Maths staff. John Burnell
The creation of the Centre for Mathematical Modelling has now been approved and Robert McKibbin has been appointed as its Director. We wish Robert well in making the Centre a well known entity both nationally and internationally.
Robert McKibbin and postgraduate student Tammy Smith attended the 20th New Zealand Geothermal Workshop 1998 held at the University of Auckland. Robert presented his paper titled ``Fluid flow in a flashing cyclone separator'' and Tammy their joint paper titled ``Towards a hydrothermal eruption flow model''.
Charles Little is going on sabbatical next year (mid-January until mid-December 1999). Charles will be doing research with Franz Rendl on graph theory at the University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria. Charles and Barbara will leave early December to have a few weeks holiday in Canada before going to Klagenfurt. We wish them a good a trip and stay in Austria and a safe return to New Zealand (hopefully not bitten by the millennium bug ).
Debbie Ormsby has recently joined Liz in the office as a secretary. We hope that Debbie will enjoy her work and will be able to put up with a bunch of mathematicians. Liz will be on leave without pay next year. Liz and Craig are going to Australia (biking from Melbourne to Sydney), Africa, UK and Europe. Starting from Amsterdam they will be biking through Europe! They intend to visit Charles and Barbara in Klagenfurt.
Anne and Dean Halford have returned from their thoroughly enjoyable holiday in the UK and Europe. Dean will be back next year part-time.
John Giffin has decided to leave the Institute of Fundamental Sciences. As from 1 January 1999 he will join the Institute of Information Sciences and Technology. He thinks that this Institute has more to offer for Operations Research. John will keep on teaching his OR papers in the mathematics discipline. Apart from his absence at future mathematics meetings we will not really notice that he dwells in a different Institute. However, this will become obvious once we have been relocated with chemistry and physics (sometimes next year). We will surely miss him and his sense of humour and his healthy cynicism.
Glenda Anthony attended LOGOS seminar on Graduate Supervision in Mathematics Education in Auckland this month (7 November). This provided a great opportunity to discuss the practicalities and experiences of supervision in an area thriving with masterate students.
From mid August to mid November this year, Dr. K. Huber visited Dr. V. Moulton at Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden, with whom she has had a successful collaboration for many years. During her visit, she also attended the fourth Nordic Phylogenetic Systematics Network Meeting (NPSN 4) at Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, and the third International Conference on Discrete Metric Spaces held at CIRM, Marseille, France.
Nick Allsop returned earlier this month from Germany where he has been completing the technical part of his thesis under the supervision of Professor Jurgen Stuckrad at the University of Leipzig. Nick and Shirley, welcome back to the Southern Hemisphere.
Bryan Manly has been chosen as the editor for 1999-2001 for the Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics (JABES), which is published jointly by the American Statistical Association and the International Biometric Society. This journal was started in 1996 as a vehicle for the publication of papers on statistical methods of immediate practical value to researchers and statistical consultants in the areas covered. One of Bryan's goals will be to get the journal more widely read and cited by non-statisticians.
Bryan took part in the fifth International Conference on Teaching Statistics, held in Singapore 20-27 June to talk about the use of projects in teaching sampling methods. He also attended the Joint Statistical Meetings in Dallas from 4-15 August to meet people involved with the production of JABES, and give a talk as part of a special session on developments in randomization methods of inference.
David Fletcher attended the International Ornithological Congress in Durban, South Africa. He did this in his role as statistician with a FRST-funded team from the University's Zoology department that is working on the sustainability of harvesting of muttonbirds (titi) by Maori. The conference was attended by over 900 delegates, and was held at an impressive new conference centre (the Non-Aligned Movement held a congress there the following week). One of the plenary sessions was given by Les Underhill, Professor of Statistics at the University of Cape Town, who provided a good example not only of applying mathematics (to model moult cycles), but also of communicating such work clearly to those of a less mathematical bent. David is now looking forward to a week of fieldwork, banding the muttonbirds, on Stewart Island in January. Visitors Dr Richard Anderson-Sprecher of the University of Wyoming is visiting until June 1999. Richard's research interest is applications of statistics, particularly in biology, including the analysis of GIS data on resource selection by animals.
Dr Gary Zerbe of Colorado State University is visiting until August 1999. Gary's research interests are in medical statistics, and uses of randomization inference with general and generalized linear models.
Seminars
For Vladimir Pestov, the mid-year break was full of events. First, Vladimir gave a talk at the 1998 Workshop on Operator Spaces at CIRM (Marseille--Luminy) upon an invitation from Gilles Pisier, and then visited the University of Genova for joint work with Ugo Bruzzo and the database theory group at the University of Bologna with a seminar talk. After he came back and did his share of marking, Gaven Martin came down from Auckland for a week of joint work, thus further strengthening links between Victoria and Auckland. Then Vladimir was off again, to give a talk at the 13-th Summer Topology Conference in Mexico city. The conference was dedicated to the 60-th birthday of a prominent set-theoretic topologist, Prof. Alexander V. Arhangel'skii (Moscow and Ohio), who was Vladimir's teacher and supervised his PhD at Moscow University back in 1980-83. Many of Vladimir's Russian topologist friends, presently scattered all over the world, have attended this reunion. The next, 14-th, Summer Topology Conference, to be held in New York City in 1999, will feature Vladimir among the major invited speakers, with the organizers covering most of his travel and accommodation. Vladimir spent the last week of the break at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, where his invited talk marked the inauguration of the Mathematical Analysis Research Group. There he also worked with researchers from the Defence Information Systems Centre and presented some of this recent results at the Australian Defense Science and Technology Organization (DSTO). A considerable fraction of funding came from sources other than Vladimir's Marsden grant, e.g. his Australian trip was fully financed by the host institution.
John Harper is retiring in January 1999, but only from teaching and administration. For the first time he'll be able to go to USA and UK April-September and miss a winter instead of collecting an extra one (present plans include the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Maths, Bristol and Heriot-Watt Mathematics Departments, and Johns Hopkins Mechanical Engineering.)
Reed Solomon is visiting Rod Downey, ex Cornell then here for four months and then to Madison where he takes up a postdoc. Denis Hirschfeldt visited from Cornell for a month. Peter Cholak (and his family) will be visiting Rod over the Christmas break.
Rod spoke at several conferences including the Australian Mathematical Society meeting at Sydney, invited speaker in the special session in combinatorics, and earlier as keynote speaker in the SIAM meeting in Toronto special session in Parameterized Complexity.
Mark McGuinness went to the ``Mathematics In Industry Study Group'' in Brisbane in February, and co-moderated the problem on the cooking of rice grist as an adjunct in the brewing of Fosters lager in China and Vietnam. He got to sample the product too. Then on to the ANZIAM conference in Coolangatta to talk about cereal cooking and brine pockets in sea ice. In July Mark visited Sean McElwain at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane and worked on asymptotic simplifications of the solution to a coal pyrolisation problem. When this Newsletter comes out, Mark will be in Australia again, visiting Melbourne (cereal cooking) and Brisbane (modelling the spread of cancer) for six weeks.
Stephen Binns has completed his MA studies supervised by Rob Goldblatt, featuring a research project on ``The Effective Topos''. He is now at Pennsylvania State University, where he has embarked on a PhD in the foundations of mathematics.
Rob Goldblatt was the NZ delegate to the 13th General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union in Dresden in August, and subsequently attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.
Thora Blithe retired on 31 March 1998. Our mathematics group is shrinking! No replacements are planned for our retirees.
Jim Neyland has been appointed to a Senior Lecturership in the School of Education, and resigned from his current MCS position at the end of June.
Eunice Mphako has arrived from Malawi to study for a PhD under Geoff Whittle. She is supported by an ODA Scholarship. We have sent her off to Oxford for a month to visit Geoff on his sabbatical!
Rob Goldblatt's book on nonstandard analysis, entitled ``Lectures on the Hyperreals'', has now been published as vol. 188 of Springer-Verlag's Graduate Texts in Mathematics series (ISBN 0-387-98464-X, price US$49.95.
Rod Downey delivered his Inaugural Address in May as Professor of Mathematics, entitled ``Computation: Limits and Structure''.
Mark McGuinness featured prominently on page two of the Evening Post, and several other New Zealand newspapers, in a brief moment of glory. The item included a photograph of Mark holding up and eating a bowl of cereal, with a piece of chalk in one hand and a nonlinear diffusion equation on the blackboard in the background. The article was about how mathematics has been used to help make crunchier cereal, a neat little news-bite indeed. Mark McGuinness
Though Graham French officially retired last year, he has been helping us this year with various teaching duties. Starting next year, Graham will take up a three year position as a Senior Tutor (half-time). We are glad to have his continued presence in our department.
The Visiting Lecturer for 1998, John Fauvel, visited at the end of September. His two delightful talks were well received.
About 100 applications were received for the lectureship vacancy. A short-list is currently being prepared. It is hoped that interviews will be completed by the end of November.
Ian Hawthorn spent two weeks in the United States as part of his study leave. While en route to the US, he made a stopover in Hawaii where he took part in a barbershop quartet competition. His quartet came second in the New Zealand division of the competition and overall were fourth or fifth. Kevin Broughan was another member of the department who participated in this competition.
A farewell function for Douglas Bridges will be held towards the end of November. In the meantime, Douglas continued his collaborative research with Hajime Ishihara (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) and Peter Schuster (University of Munich). They visited Douglas for two weeks during the latter half of October.
Nye John recently hosted Emlyn Williams (CSIRO, Australia) for another short visit. Lyn Hunt is currently in Brisbane, working with Kaye Basford from the University of Queensland and Murray Jorgensen recently visited Victoria University, Wellington, to discuss Computer Network Modelling with David Harte and Peter Smith. In December, Nye John and Judi McWhirter will attend and present papers to IBC98 in Capetown. Our honorary lecturer, Harold Henderson, from Ruakura, is also planning to attend.
Ray Littler, who has been visiting with Larry Weldon at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada, is due back early January 1999. Murray Jorgensen will commence his sabbatical by attending Uncertainty 99 at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, January 1999. He will then be at Monash University working on Minimum Message Length Inference with Chris Wallace and David Dowe of the Computer Science Department. Towards the end of his sabbatical, he is planning to visit Geoff McLachlan at the University of Queensland.
Success for our DPhil students, includes the appointment of Kathy Ruggiero to a lectureship at Massey University, Albany Campus, commencing 1 February, 1999. She will continue her DPhil studies part-time and plans to submit mid-year, 1999. The department extends its best wishes to Kathy. Samuel Manda is about to submit his DPhil thesis entitled ``A Nested Random Effects Model Analysis of Child Survival in Malawi''. He returns to his lectureship at the University of Malawi, Zomba Campus, Malawi, in early December 1998.
And so my overwhelming response to being here in the University of Brunei Darussalam, after many years away from direct involvement in mathematics, is one of joy and appreciation in the privilege of being involved again in the teaching of Mathematics. As with all who are glad to be teachers that joy is associated both with the relationships that teaching brings with students in one's care and with the intellectual satisfaction of always growing in understanding of the subject knowledge being shared and communicated.
The Mathematics Department , too, teaches only to first degree level, with the majority of its students likewise intending to be teachers of mathematics at the secondary level. But for some years it has also provided a four year B.Sc. in mathematics, some eight students or so now graduating each year. A special feature of this programme is that in the second half of their third year of study the students are required to spend a full semester in a selected work situation designed to equip them with mathematical experience in a work environment.
The Mathematics Department also incorporates the teaching of Computer Science, particularly providing the first two years of a programme which leads to a final two years in the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, and a degree in Computer Science conferred by that University. As well, the Department provides the mathematical components of the first two years of a degree in Electrical Engineering offered through the University of Glasgow, and which the Bruneian students complete by taking the third and fourth years at Glasgow.
With some twenty five staff, including permanent tutors, the Mathematics Department is one of the largest in the University. Like the academic staff community of the University as a whole, the overwhelming majority are expatriate. Some ten countries are represented in the staff of the Mathematics Department, which also includes a growing group of local graduates. Research interests amongst staff are diverse, ranging from a strong interest on the applied side in mathematical modelling, through algebra and group theory, functional analysis number theory and discrete mathematics to numerical analysis, operations research and statistics.
In the short term mathematics staff in New Zealand universities have much to contribute to developments in mathematics in this region. In the longer term mathematics in New Zealand will stand to gain much in return as the mathematical activities here grow in strength and importance.