2007 Staff news

From MathsDept

• 19 December 2007 Bill Barton has been awarded a Hood Fellowship to spend a part of the semester 1 2008 at the University of Oxford.

• 20 December 2007 Joel Schiff's third book Cellular Automata: A Discrete View of the World was just published by Wiley. (From the Editor: This book is an overview of the subject, written at the level of Scientific American. In fact, the first worldwide exposure of the subject of CA was in Scientific American, in Martin Gardner's columns on the "Game of Life". The book also includes interesting discussions on the nature of consciousness, swarm intelligence, emergence, and of course, self-organization, as these form an integral part of the CA milieu. The text should allow anyone with a basic scientific understanding, be they in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, economics etc., to apply the discrete modeling techniques of CA to their own scientific endeavors. Much of life on Earth, from seashell patterns to neural activity in the brain, to the formation of bacterial colonies, becomes amenable to investigation with this essentially elementary technique.)

• 16 December 2007 An international one-day workshop was held to honour Boris Pavlov's work, on the occasion of his retirement

• 15 December 2007

David Bryant was promoted to Associate Professor

Warren Moors got over the Senior lecturer bar.

Hannah Bartholomew and Tom ter Elst were promoted Senior lecturers

Jamie Sneddon and Greg Oates who got over bars in the Senior Tutor scale.

"Especially I would like to congratulate Tom ter Elst and Jamie Sneddon who, in addition to the promotion they applied for, received a jump step. This is a rare event and indicates that the applicant far exceeds the criteria for their grade." (Bill Barton)

13 November 2007 Bill Barton's book The Language of Mathematics: Telling Mathematical Tales has just been published (by Springer). Bill's book takes a new approach to looking at how different languages express mathematical ideas (such as number, position and pattern) and illustrates the possibility of different mathematical worlds - challenging the notion that mathematics is an expression of universal human thought. It also explores the implications for the ways in which we learn and teach mathematics.... Well done, Bill!

10 November 2007 Dr. Arkadii Slinko has won a Dean's Teaching Excellence Award. The citation for this well-deserved award talks specifically about his "rare talent" with advancing students, mentioning his publications with undergraduate researchers and his work on the Olympiad programme. It also mentions what we all know, Arkadii's insightful contributions to our course development cycles. Arkadii, we celebrate with you.

9 November 2007 Interviewing phase for the Applied Mathematics lectureship recruitment: for seminars and interview details login with your maths user name and password

7 November 2007 "Cellular Automata - A Discrete View of the World" by Joel L. Schiff, published by John Wiley & Sons, is due for release on 21 December 2007.

16 October 2007 Congratulations to Paul Bonnington of his appointment as a Professor at Monash University.

28 September 2007 The Department had an open position at the Lecturer/Senior Lecturer level in Applied Mathematics within the Department of Mathematics. The position is intended for candidates with a PhD in Applied Mathematics, or related area, who demonstrate a strong commitment to excellence in research and teaching at all levels of Applied Mathematics. The recruitment process is now in the "long-list" phase.

10 September 2007 Steven Galbraith has accepted an appointment with us to fill the Algebra/Combinatorics vacancy created by Jozef Siran's departure.

4 September 2007 A successful Department Retreat was held on Tuesday 4 September at Tamaki Campus. Highlights of the meeting were an extended discussion of the Departmental Plan and a review of our use of technology in teaching. Particularly notable was the summary statistics showing that our Pass Rates and Course and Lecturer Evaluations are steadily improving.

26 July 2007 Congratulations to Colin Fox who has taken up a position with the University of Otago.

16 June 2007 The Department of Mathematics is saddened by the passing away of their Emeritus Professor and former Head of Department, Emeritus Professor John Kalman

18 May 2007 The Department appointed Komal Prasad as a Mac/IT support staff member. She provides the technical support for all Mac OS users in the Department. Welcome Komal!

April 2007

• John Butcher has a contract with Wileys to prepare a second edition of his 2003 book “Numerical Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations”.
• Vaughan Jones is to be awarded the Prix Mondial Nessim Habif at a special ceremony at the University of Geneva on 5 June, for his achievements in mathematics. This is an annual prize awarded to prominent researchers from all disciplines.
• Paul Bonnington has been appointed as one of the three New Zealand University representatives on the KAREN (Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network) Advisory Council.

16 April 2007 The Department had an open lectureship in Algebra and Combinatorics, to replace A/Prof. Josef Siran.

January 2007 Tom ter Elst received the first and second prize for the best lecture for first year students in business engineering in Eindhoven for the academic year 2005/2006. Tom gave the Calculus 1 and Calculus 2 courses in Eindhoven.

1 January 2007 Professor Ivan L. Reilly has been appointed Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM), for services to Mathematics. "Ivan, congratulations from us all: this is a wonderful acknowledgement of the work that you have put in over many years for mathematics and mathematics education. Not only have you beavered away to promote our field and its standing in New Zealand, but you have done it with such good grace and in a way that includes us all in your achievements" , Bill Barton, HoD.