News

Victoria student gets ticket to Cambridge

A Victoria University student is the only New Zealander this year to be awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, to study at a postgraduate level at the University of Cambridge.

Wellingtonian Felix Barber, who is graduating in May with a Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours (majoring in Mathematics and Physics), was one of 51 students from 24 countries to be awarded the Gates Scholarship, which will allow him to study for his Master’s in Applied Mathematics. Globally, more than 3,500 students applied for the scholarships, which assess intellectual ability, leadership capacity, academic fit with Cambridge and the applicant’s commitment to improving the lives of others.

Barber’s award comes after recent success with the William Georgetti Scholarship, which awarded him $180,000 over three years to support the PhD study he hopes to begin at Cambridge after his Master’s degree. The William Georgetti Scholarship is aimed at encouraging postgraduate study and research in a field that is important to the social, cultural or economic development of New Zealand.

“It’s exciting to be awarded these two scholarships and I am very grateful,” says Barber. “I am keen to take full advantage of any opportunities that come my way in the UK to do interesting and exciting work, so that I can one day give back to New Zealand.”

Barber, who originally planned a career as a journalist before realising he was “actually quite good at physics”, plans to focus on research into condensed matter physics or biophysics.

“I want to expand my knowledge base into these areas because I think they will allow me to do work that will have the greatest impact on the lives of others. My hope for the future is to produce research in a dynamic area of physics that can have a positive impact on serious world issues, such as the development of technologies to facilitate sustainable human existence.”

Outside of study, Barber sings in the Wellington Youth Choir, is a keen mountain biker and is learning Spanish. He was also responsible for co-founding the Victoria University Science Society to provide both a social and academic focus for students in the wider science community.

The Sacks Prize for the best PhD thesis in logic worldwide in 2011 has been won by Dr Adam Day who completed his PhD in "Randomness and Computability" with the School in 2011 under the supervision of Professor Rod Downey. It is the first time this prize has been won outside of France, Toronto and the US. It is recognition of the logic group at VUW, and of Adam's thesis. Adam is currently in receipt of a Miller Fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley and also won the Royal Society's Hatherton Prize last year for the best paper in physical, earth or maths and information sciences by a New Zealand university PhD student. Our congratulations to Adam!

Professor Downey will receive a 2009 VUW Award for Research Excellence on 25 March 2009. Congratulations to Rod!

Two new books have been published recently, authored by members of the School. Professors Rob Goldblatt and Rod Downey, both members of the Mathematics group for the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research.

Rob Goldblatt's new book is "Quantifiers, Propositions and Identity: Admissible Semantics for Quantified Modal and Substructural Logics" published by Cambridge University Press and the Association for Symbolic Logic.

Earlier in the year, Rod Downey and Denis Hirschfeldt had their book "Algorithmic Randomness and Complexity" published by Springer.

Johnathan Crook and Giorgi Kvizhinadze have completed their PhDs. Jonathan's thesis is entitled "Ice Growth and Platelet Crystals in Antarctica", supervised by Mark McGuinness, and Giorgi's thesis is "Large number of rare events: Diversity analysis in multiple choice questionares and related topics", supervised by Estate Khmaladze.

Congratulations to both!

Congratulations to Galym Akishev who has completed the requirements for his PhD with his thesis "Monadic Bounded Algebras" under the supervision of Prof Rob Goldblatt.

Our congratulations to former postdoctoral fellow Dr Antonio Montalban who worked with Professor Downey (supported by the Marsden Fund and NZIMA). He recently got tenure at University of Chicago and was awarded a Packard Fellowship (the only one in maths this year) worth $US875K over 5 years (unrestricted).

Kyle Tate was co-winner of the Kerr prize for the best student presentation at the Sixth Australasian Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation held last week in Queenstown. Kyle is supervised by Professor Matt Visser. Congratulations Kyle. See http://www.maths.otago.ac.nz/acgrg6/programme.php for further details.

Success for MSc Student

Simon Anastasiadis recently finished his MSc study in Statistics and Operations Research with distinction. At the end of 2012 he applied for

PhD study at several prestigious US universities. As a result, Simon was offered admission to the University of California, Berkeley, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research programme, along with the prestigious Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, which is offered to only the top four percent of admitted doctoral students. He was also offered admission to the interdepartmental doctoral degree programme in Operations Research at MIT with full financial support for four academic years. In addition, he was offered admission to the Management Science and Engineering programme at Stanford University also with full financial support. Simon has accepted the offer from Stanford and will be undertaking his postgraduate studies starting September 2013. Congratulations to Simon!

Congratulations to Statistics Graduate Diploma student Ray Tobler who has been awarded a Victoria Graduate Award to support his studies in statistics and quantitative genetics.

And congratulations too to Vidette McGregor has been awarded a Ministry of Fisheries Postgraduate Scholarship in Quantitative Fisheries Science. She will undertake an MSc in Statistics and Operations Research and will pursue a thesis in Modelling of Fish Populations.

Congratulations to Sima Rouhollahi who has been awarded a VUW PhD scholarship. She is planning to write a thesis on the topic of Mathematical models for imperfect repairs of systems in two-dimensions (time and usage). She will carry out this work under the supervision of Dr Stefanka Chukova and Dr Richard Arnold, and begin her studies in September.

Congratulations to Statistics Graduate Diploma student Ray Tobler and his supervisor Dr Nokuthaba Sibanda: Ray has been awarded the Livestock Improvement Corporation Patrick Shannon Undergraduate Scholarship for 2009. Ray will receive a grant to support his studies, and will also work for one month at the Livestock Improvement Corporation on a project in quantitative genetics.

Sarah Marshall, who completed her MSc in 2007 in Statistics and Operations Research and got a full financial support from the University of Edinburgh for her PhD study, has been offered a 2 year fixed term teaching associate position at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Congratulations to Sarah!

Congratulations to Noam Greenberg who has won one of ten nationwide Rutherford Fellowships for future stars of New Zealand science. Noam's fellowship is worth $200,000 per annum for five years to enable him to pursue his research into non-computable objects.

Professor Rod Downey has been awarded the 2011 Hector Medal for outstanding work in mathematical and information sciences by a researcher in New Zealand. Professor Downey was awarded the medal for his influential and innovative work in mathematical logic.

Rod Downey along with collaborators Denis Hirschfeldt (our regular visitor from Chicago), Andre Nies (Auckland) and Sebaastiaan Terwjn (Nijmegen) have won the 2010 Schoenfield Prize (article section) for outstanding writing in the field of logic. The prize, of $1,000, is for their article 'Calibrating Randomness' (BSL, September 2006) and will be awarded at the 2011 ASL North American Meeting in Berkeley in March. This is an outstanding achievement

Research Excellence in Mathematics and Statistics

The TEC's 2012 PBRF research evaluation has confirmed that the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research has an outstanding group of academic staff that places it firmly among the leaders in mathematical sciences research in New Zealand.

In the two subject areas of Pure and Applied Mathematics, and Statistics, the School's research groups ranked second in the country, alongside Otago in mathematics and behind Auckland in statistics. The PBRF results reveal the strength of mathematical sciences in New Zealand, with Pure and Applied Mathematics the most highly ranked subject, indicating that around 68% of research-active mathematicians in the country produced research that is recognised to be of high quality internationally or nationally in the evaluation period 2006-11.

In particular, SMSOR's mathematics group has the highest proportion, over 45%, of internationally recognised researchers in any subject at any university in New Zealand. The commitment to producing relevant and high quality research of our staff in statistics and operations research has seen the School climb from 4th ranked in 2006 to 2nd in the current evaluation.

The research undertaken covers a wide range of theoretical and applied problems, including the limits of computation and logical reasoning, cosmology and the structure of black holes, statistical analyses of spatial processes, biometrics of NZ flora and fauna, demographic and health statistics, modelling volcanic eruptions, warranty and reliability analysis, the mathematics of discrete structures, algorithms for optimisation, number theory and more.

The School retains its strong commitment to teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, undertaken by lecturers whose research continues to generate vital and fascinating new knowledge.

Adam Day has been awarded a Postgraduate Research Excellence Award. Adam is undertaking a PhD and is supervised by Professor Rod Downey and already has several publications to his credit.

Professor Geoff Whittle and Dr. Noam Greenberg have been awarded Victoria University Research Excellence Awards. Congratulations to them both.

Congratulations to Professor Estate Khmaladze who recently gave an invited public lecture for the Tbilisi State University in Georgia. There he was presented with the I. Javakhishvili medal. Javakhishvili is a classical figure in Georgian culture, the author of the monumental "History of Georgia" (usually in 12 volumes). He was one of the founders of Tbilisi State University. The I. Javakhishvili Medal is the highest honour the University can award.

Congratulations to Professor Matt Visser who has been awarded a prestigious 2 year James Cook Fellowship. He is one of 2 winners nationwide in mathematical sciences.

Congratulations to Prof. David Vere-Jones, who was awarded the Campbell Award by the New Zealand Statistical Association on 2 September 2009.

The purpose of the award is to promote statistics within NZ and to recognise an individual's contribution to the promotion and development of statistics. Throughout his career Prof. Vere-Jones has generously contributed to statistics education at all levels - inside and outside the University - and has an outstanding research and publication record. We are delighted to celebrate with Prof. Vere-Jones the award of this honour.

Congratulations to....

• Antonio Montalban, previously a postdoc here at VUW has just received a AMS centennial fellowship
  http://www.ams.org/ams/press/cent-fell-09-10.html

• Selwyn Keng Meng Ng has accepted a van Vleck postdoctoral fellowship to the University of Madison, Wisconsin beginning September, 2009.

Congratulations to Selwyn Keng Meng Ng who has had his PhD "Computability, traceability and beyond" finalised and deposited in the Library

Celine Cattoen has submitted her PhD thesis entitled: "Applied mathematics of space-time and space+time: Problems in general relativity and cosmology". Her supervisor was Professor Matt Visser. She will soon be taking up a postdoctoral position at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Petarpa Boonserm who recently completed her PhD with Professor Matt Visser with a thesis entitled "Rigorous bounds on Transmission, Reflection, and Bogoliubov coefficients". She will be taking up a junior position in the Mathematics Department at Chulalongkorn University, in Bangkok, Thailand.

Congratulations to Celine and Petarpa on their successes!

At the recent New Zealand Association of Mathematics and Statistics Graduates conference PhD student, Tim McKenzie (supervisor Professor Rob Goldblatt) won the prize for the peoples choice (this was the favourite talk of the conference voted for by everyone that attended).

Congratulatons to Noam Greenberg who has won a John Templeton Turing Research Fellowship. This Fellowship is one of 5 awarded to comemorate the Alan Turing Centenary Year. The fellowship provides Dr Greenberg with 75,000 UK Pounds to support his research over the next years. Noam was awarded the fellowship in a webcast ceremony at the Turing Centenary Conference at Manchester on Turing's birthday, 23rd June. For more details see

http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/give-page.php?408

Noam won this award in theme 4: "How should we compute? New Models of Logic and Computation".

Congratulations to Dr Noam Greenberg who has been awarded the Royal Society Hamilton Prize for 2009. This prize is awarded annually by the Royal Society for the encouragement of beginners in scientific or technological research in New Zealand or in the islands of the South Pacific Ocean.

Congratulations to Statistics PhD student Darcy Webber, who was co-recipient of the student prize for best student presentation at the New Zealand Statistical Association meeting 29-30 November 2012. Darcy shares the award with Brigid Betz-Stablein from Massey University.

Congratulations to Drs Richard Arnold and I-Ming Liu along with Professors Shirley Pledger and Rod Downey who have been awarded Marsden grants. The team of Arnold, Liu and Pledger have been awarded the 3-year grant for their project in Applied Statistics, "Cluster Analysis for Ordinal Categorical Data", while Professor Downey is awarded the grant for his project on "Algorithmic Randomness, Computation and Complexity".

At the recent NZ Postgraduate Student Conference in Mathematics and Statistics the prize for best pure maths talk went to Ben Clark. Melissa Welsh won the prize for the best applied mathematics talk. Our congratulations to them on their achievement.

Both Ben and Melissa are PhD students in the School. This conference was organised by MSOR this year, led by PhD student Michael Snook.

Congratulations to Kane O'Donnell, one of the School's Summer research scholars who completed a project under the supervision of Prof Matt Visser over the summer.Kane won the prize for the poster with most impact for his poster : "Velocity addition in special relativity"resulting from this work.

He is also the coauthor (with Prof Visser) of the article "Elementary analysis of the special relativistic combination of velocities, Wigner rotation, and Thomas precession".

PhD student Keng Meng (Selwyn), Ng has accepted a van Vleck postdoctoral fellowship to the University of Wisconsin-Madison beginning September, 2009. Selwyn has recently completed his PhD Thesis, "Computability, Traceability and Beyond". He studied under Professor Rod Downey. Congratulations Selwyn!

Staff in the School have once again been very successful in the latest Marsden round. Our congratulations to Prof Geoff Whittle, Dr Hung Pham (who won a Fast Start grant) and to Prof Rod Downey who has been awarded a one year extension to an existing grant.

Congratulations to Dr Peter Donelan who is leading a team which has won one of the inaugural Learning and Teaching Grants for their project: 'Maple TA: A testing and learning tool for mathematics'.

The proposal is for the School to pilot use of an online learning, testing and assessment tool, Maple TA (http://www.maplesoft.com/products/mapleta/index.aspx). This is produced by Maplesoft who are responsible for the computer algebra system Maple that is widely used around the world. It enables lecturers and course coordinators to develop question banks that provide practice and assessment (including self-assessment) opportunities for students.

Congratulations to Laurent Bienvenu, one of Rod Downey's current postdocs, who has won the Gilles Kahn Specif prize for the best thesis in computer science in France. It is several thousand Euros.

Congratulations to Prof Rob Goldblatt who has won the 2012 Jones Medal, the mathematical sciences award for lifetime achievement, awarded every two years. Prof Rob Goldblatt FRSNZ won the award for his world-leading research in modal logic and category theory.

1. Matt Visser has won a FQXi mini grant [US$10,000] to bring overseas researchers to New Zealand to give technical seminars. For more details see here.

2. Petarpa Boonserm and Matt Visser have published article that has now been selected for inclusion in "IOP Select". See iop.org and more specifically here for more details.
   This article, "Transmission probabilities and the Miller�Good transformation" was published in the Journal of Physics: Mathematical and Theoretical 42 No 4 (30 January 2009) 045301.

3. Three visitors coming to the general relativity group:
   • Dr Thomas Sotiriou, postdoc at the University of Maryland. (28 Jan to 19 Feb)
   • Dr Silke Weinfurtner, postdoc at the University of British Columbia. (28 Jan to 19 Feb)
   • Gil Jannes, graduate student at the Astrophysics Institute of Andalusia, Granada, Spain (18 Feb to 26 Mar)
   These visitors will all be presenting technical seminars (details TBA) on aspects of general relativity.

Professor Matt Visser has been elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society . Membership is limited to no more than one half of one percent of the membership and is recognition by his peers of his outstanding contributions to physics.

The citation, which will appear on his Fellowship Certificate, will read as follows:
"For contributions to gravity theory, especially the effects of energy condition violations and the development of analog models of black hole and cosmological spacetimes."

Following Professor Matt Visser 's public talk on Black Holes at the Wellington Public Library on 9/9/2009 the most recent issue of Scientific American (October 2009) contains an article (pp 39 - 45) on black holes by him and his collaborators. This is an excellent introduction to Professor Visser's work.

Congratulations to Professor Estate Khmaladze, Professsor Matt Visser and Dr. Noam Greenberg who have been awarded Marsden grants for 2009, and to Dr Byoung Kim and Dr Dillon Mayhew who have been awarded Marsden Fast Start grants for young researchers. These prestigious awards will allow the recipients to carry out foundational research in the mathematical sciences.

Congratulations to Dr Peter Nelson who will be a post-doctoral fellow in the School (under the supervision of Professor Geoff Whittle) who has been awarded a Fulbright Travel Award for a visit to the USA in September. The grant is to give various seminars in the USA, contributing to communication and exchange of knowledge between the US and NZ. Dr Nelson will be giving departmental seminars at Princeton, Rutgers and Columbia Universities, and the New York Combinatorics Seminar hosted by SUNY Brooklyn in September. The talks will be on his research in extremal matroid theory. He will also be working with Stefan van Zwam at Princeton.

Congratulations to Professor Estate Khmaladze on being elected to a Fellowship in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. This fellowship honours Prof Khmaladze's outstanding research and professional contributions in the field of statistics and probability.

Congratulations to Professor Estate Khmaladze who has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand - he is regarded as a leading international expert in statistical models, making significant contributions in not only theoretical work, but also for statistical problems in finance, insurance and other related fields.

Congratulation to Dr Hung le Pham who has been awarded a London Mathematical Society grant for his project "Multi- norms and multi-Banach algebras". The project involves a collaboration between Dr Garth Dales from the University of Leeds and Dr. Pham. Dr. Pham will be visiting the Universities of Leeds, Glasgow, Lancaster and Nottingham over the summer. This visit was arranged by Dr Matthew Daws of the University of Leeds who is one of the academics Dr. Pham will be working with during his visit.

Our congratulations to Dr Dillon Mayhew from the Mathematics group who has been awarded a Victoria University of Wellington Early Career Research Excellence award.

ORST 482 Official Statistics has won (jointly with an Ethiopian initiative) the ISI International Statistical Literacy Project 2011 "Best Cooperative Project Award". The International Statistical Literacy Project's Best Cooperative Project Award in Statistical Literacy is given once every two years in recognition of outstanding, innovative, and influential statistical literacy projects that affect a broad segment of the general public and are fruit of the cooperation of different types of institutions (national statistical offices, schools, statistical societies, media, libraries etc.).

The 2011 joint winners were:

• From Ethiopia, The Belgian (Flemish), Ethiopian and Mozambique universities with the project, "North-South-South (NSS) International Collaborative Project in Biostatistics".
• From New Zealand, Statistics New Zealand and NAOS (the Network of Academics in Official Statistics) with the project, "A post-graduate program in official statistics" (local participants Richard Arnold and Sharleen Forbes).

Congratulations to PhD student Valentina Baccetti (supervisor Professor Matt Visser) who was the shared winner of the prize for best talk in the Applied Maths category at the New Zealand Mathematics and Statistics Postgraduate conference of this year in Auckland. Her presentation was on "Inertial frames without the relativity principle: breaking Lorentz symmetry."

Congratulations to Shaochuan Lu who has completed the requirements for his PhD with his thesis "Extensions of Markov Modulated Poisson Processes and Their Applications to Deep Earthquakes" under the supervision of Professor David Vere-Jones and Dr. David Harte.

Congratulations to Robin Averill who has completed her PhD "Teacher-student relationships in diverse New Zealand Year 10 mathematics classrooms: Teacher care." The thesis was under the supervision of Associate-Professor Megan Clark.

Congratulations to Professor Rod Downey FRSNZ from Victoria‘s School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, who has been selected to join the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, in honour of his distinguished contribution to mathematics. He will be officially inducted at the world‘s largest mathematics meeting, the 2013 Joint Mathematics Meetings, in San Diego in January.

Statistics PhD student Darcy Webber has won the Ministry for Primary Industries Prize for Student Oral Presentation making the best use of Quantitative Methodology at the joint Australian Marine Sciences Association/New Zealand Marine Science Society Conference held recently in Hobart (1-5 July 2012). Darcy is supervised by Dr Richard Arnold. Congratulations to Darcy.

Congratulations to Petarpa Boonserm who has completed the requirements for her PhD with her thesis "Rigorous Bounds on Transmission, Reflection and Bogoliubov Coefficients" under the supervision of Prof Matt Visser.

More success at the New Zealand Mathematics and Statistics Postgraduate conference where MSOR student Paul Cordue won the prize for the peoples choice with his talk about "Adventures in Block Land". Congratulations to Paul.

At the New Zealand Statistical Association 2009 meeting, held at Victoria University last week, Honours graduate Lisa Woods won the prize for best poster, for her project entitled "A probabilistic method of tectonic stress estimation." In the poster Lisa described how she made a map of the tectonic stresses in the earth's crust under New Zealand, using earthquake data.

Congratulations to Kemmawadee Preedalikit (Far) who has successfully completed her PhD on "Joint Modeling of Longitudinal Ordinal Data on Quality of Life and Survival." The thesis was completed under the supervision of Dr I-Ming Liu and Dr Nokuthaba Sibanda.

Congratulations to Jozef Skakala who has successfully completed his PhD on "Aspects of general relativity: Pseudo-Finsler extensions, Quasi-normal frequencies, and multiplication of tensorial distributions". The thesis was completed under the supervision of Professor Matt Visser.

Congratrulations to Haizhen (Eric) Wu who successfully defended his PhD thesis on "Divisible statistics and their partial sum processess: asymptotic properties and applications". Eric's supervisor was Professor Estate Khmaladze.

Congratulations to Gabriel Abreu who has successfully completed his PhD on "Kodama time, entropy bounds, the Raychaudhuri equation, and the quantum interest conjecture". The thesis was completed under the supervision of Professor Matt Visser.

Congratulations to Dayle Anderson who has successfully completed her PhD on "Teacher Knowledges, Classroom Realities: Implementing Sociocultural Science in New Zealand Year 7 and 8 Classrooms". The thesis was completed under the supervision of Associate Professor Megan Clark.

Congratulations to Brenda Sherley who has successfully completed her PhD on "'Kindergarten and New Entrant Teachers' Beliefs and Practices in Mathematics Teaching and Learning". The thesis was completed under the supervision of Associate-Professor Megan Clark along with Dr Joanna Higgins (Faculty of Education). Brenda is currently working for UNESCO in Samoa.

It looks like BD Kim will not be seeing much summer weather over the next few years. He has been invited as a research visitor to both the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn and IHES (The Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques) near Paris. These are two of the world's most prestigious institutions for research in mathematics. He will be spending the summer of 2012/3 at MPIM and the summer of 2013/4 at IHES. Judging by last summer in Wellington, he won't be missing much.

Congratulations to Adam Day who has successfully completed his PhD on "Randomness and Computability". The thesis was completed under the supervision of Professor Rod Downey. Adam leaves to take up a research fellowship at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the Berkeley campus of the University of California shortly.

Carolyn Chun, one of our postdocs working with Geoff Whittle and Dillon Mayhew on a two-year project funded by an International Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, has won the 2012 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel.

Carolyn did a Masters of Fine Arts at the same time as her PhD in matroid theory, and a novel she wrote at that time, "How to Break Article Noun," has won the award, which honours "the most innovative novel submitted during the previous calendar year". Congratulations to Carolyn! Here's a link with further details about the Kenneth Patchen Award:

http://www.experimentalfiction.com/Kenneth_Patchen_Award.html

Also, here's another link about the NSF International Research Fellowship which is funding Carolyn's current research on excluded minors for matroid representability over the five-element field:

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5179

Carolyn Chun has been awarded a two-year International Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. The NSF is one of the preeminent funding bodies for science in the USA. Their International Research Fellowships are designed to support international collaborative opportunities for reseachers in the early stages of their careers.

Carolyn arrived at Victoria in August 2008, after completing her PhD at Louisiana State University, to do research in matroid theory. Her stay is currently supported by the Marsden grant of Geoff Whittle. With the sponsorship of the NSF, she can extend her stay for another two years. Long enough for plenty of matroid theory, but more importantly, enough time for her collaborators to teach her the rules of cricket!

More information on the IRF programme can be found here:

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5179

Congratulations go to Bethan Cropp, Matt Visser's MSc student: she has won the Hartle Award for best student presentation at the international General Relativity conference in Mexico last July , competing against many PhD students. The talk she gave was based on the paper she and Matt wrote on "General polarization modes for the Rosen gravitational wave" which was recently published in the journal "Classical and Quantum Gravity".

Note that 2 of Matt's PhD students ,Silke and Celine won the same award at the previous GR18 conference in Sydney. There is at most one award from each parallel session, and there are six awards overall, from a conference of some 600 attendees, so congratulations to Matt too!

Ben Clark was given the prize for the best student talk at the recent ACCMCC conference in Canberra. This is the Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing and is the most significant conference in discrete mathematics held in Australia/New Zealand. Congratulations Ben!

Andreana Holowatyj, who took part in the Summer Research Scholarships scheme, which is aimed to give students a meaningful research experience, won best overall in group four, Faculty of Science, in the Summer Gold Poster Competition. Her poster entitled "Characterizing Moves in Hexagonal Regions of Hextile Knot Mosaics" came from her summer research which was supervised by Professor Geoff Whittle. This year the number of entries was up by 50 per cent from the previous year and the quality made the judging an extremely difficult task.

OUr congratulations to Kylie Reiri, an applied statistics Masters student, who has been awarded a Te Tipu Putaiao (Maori Knowledge) Fellowship from FoRST. Kylie is one of four Victoria students, and one of only nine nationally, to win this award.

Under the supervision of Richard Arnold (SMSOR) and Adele Whyte (SBS), Kylie will conduct a statistical analysis of temporal and spatial variation in the Ngati Kahungunu fisheries catch. Her aim is to provide an improved view of the fisheries data currently collected in the Ngati Kahungunu rohe (boundaries), including reporting results at a finer geographical scale. Kylie will report back to Ngati Kahungunu stakeholders, iwi, scientific and industry groups, and to government.

Adam Day, a PhD student studying under the supervision of Professor Rod Downey has been awarded a Miller Research Fellowship for a three year term 2011-2014. Miller Research Fellowships are intended for brilliant young women and men of great promise who have recently been awarded, or who are about to be awarded, the doctoral degree. The Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science is located at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. All research is performed in the facilities provided by the host UC Berkeley academic department.The Institute will provide an annual stipend of US$60,000 and a research fund of US$12,000 per annum.

Antonio Montalbán, recently a Post-Doctoral fellow of Victoria University under Rod Downey, has been awarded the prestigious American Mathematical Society Centennial Fellowship for the 2009-2010 academic year. The fellowship is presented annually, for excellence in research achievement. The stipend for his fellowship is US$75,000, plus an expense allowance of US$7,500.

Antonio's research field is computability theory. In general, he is interested in measuring the complexity of proofs and constructions from classical mathematics. He plans to use his fellowship to visit Berkeley, among other places, and to work on finding the proof-theoretic strength of Laver's theorem and other theorems that seem to require proofs of particularly high complexity.

More information can be found at http://www.ams.org/ams/press/cent-fell-09-10.html

2011 Prizewinners

Several prizes to honour outstanding mathematics and statistics students are listed at Academic Prizes. The oldest of these goes back to 1929. The following list of 2011 prizewinners is a small tribute to some of our best students.

First year

John P. Good Memorial Prize (MATH 142, 151, 161): jointly between Timothy Caldwell, Brandon Ross

Rotary Club of Wellington Prize (MATH 151, 161): Nguyen, Hoai Bach

Rotary Club of Wellington Prize (MATH177, STAT193): Saleha Yunus

Shayle Searle Prize (STAT 193): Hayley Landreth

Second year

Macmorran Prize (MATH 211, 243, 244, 251): Lee, Chang Min

Jenny Whitmarsh Award (female; MATH 243, 244, 251): Jessica Franklin

J. T. Campbell Prize (MATH277): Christina Vergunst

Third year

W. H. Vaughan Prize (MATH 301, 312, 313, 321): Luke Pratley

David Payne Memorial Prize (MATH 321, 322): Peter Moore

Statistics New Zealand Prize (MATH 377; STAT 332, 392, 393): Gabrielle McElwee

Health and Disability Intelligence Prize (STAT 392): Charlotte Gutenbrunner

The Hatherton Award for 2011 has been awarded to the pure mathematician Dr Adam Day for his paper entitled "Increasing the Gap between Descriptional Complexity and Algorithmic Probability" which was published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in October 2011. Dr Day was the single author of the paper and worked from the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, Victoria University of Wellington.

The paper is published in one of the world's top pure mathematics journals and reports a fundamental contribution to the area of algorithmic information theory, concerned with the relationship between the a priori probability of an event and the event's shortest descriptional length. The author has solved a 26 year old question in the area and the result is regarded by the referees as a tour de force of lasting value and considered a most significant result in algorithmic information theory.

Dr Day completed his undergraduate and PhD degrees at Victoria University under the supervision of Professor Rod Downey and has now received a Miller Fellowship to further his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The Hatherton Award is awarded annually for the best paper in physical, earth or maths and information sciences by a New Zealand University PhD student. It was established in memory of Trevor Hatherton FRSNZ, President of the Royal Society of New Zealand 1985-89, and awarded for the first time in 1997.