News

Hot on the heels of the first of the MSOR School Colloquium Talks - Richard Arnold 's talk on earthquakes and his election night forecasting, which attracted a large audience - comes the second colloquium talk, this time by Rod Downey. Rod's talk, "When does a problem have a solution: A logician and computability theorist's view", is aimed at a very general audience, and will be accessible to beginning graduate or even advanced undergraduate students.

The talk will be given in the Cotton Club (CO339) at 4pm on Friday May 8th, with refreshments to follow. For more information about the MSOR Research Colloquia, visit http://msor.victoria.ac.nz/Main/MSORColloquia, or click on the link on the left side of this page. A short description of Rod's talk is given below:

Much of mathematics is devoted to giving solutions to equations, calculating solutions to problems, classifying structures according to invariants and the like. Natural questions arise as to when this is not possible. This talk looks at questions such as this tracing, in a idiosyncratic way, a historical line leading to modern incarnations wherein logic allows us to show that no invariants are possible for (e.g.) certain problems in group theory. This is done by showing that normal mathematical structures can be caused to emulate computation in faithful ways.

Welcome to Dr Eleni Matechou who is joining us for the year to work with Professor Shirley Pledger and Dr Richard Arnold and to take part in some of our Applied Statistics teaching. Eleni recently completed her PhD at the University of Kent at Canterbury in the UK.

Welcome to Dr Petros Hadjicostas who has joined the staff. Dr Hadjicostas is a mathematical statistician with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon and was recently on staff at the Texas Tech University.

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!

At 4pm Friday 17 July 2009, in CO339, Dillon Mayhew will present the next MSOR Colloqium: "What is a Matroid?"

Abstract: Matroids are abstract objects that lie just beneath the surface of many naturally-occurring mathematical entities. In this talk I will explain what matroids are, why you should be interested in them, and more particularly, why I am interested in them. The talk will be introductory, and no prior knowledge will be assumed.

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!

A PhD Vice-Chancellor's Strategic Research Topic Scholarship for "Particle Swarm Optimization for Image Recognition" is available under the supervision of Dr Mark Johnston.

Image recognition tasks arise in a wide variety of practical situations, e.g., detecting faces from video images, identifying suspected terrorists from fingerprint images and diagnosing medical conditions from X-rays. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a stochastic, population-based evolutionary algorithm for solving optimization problems (in Operations Research) and image classification problems (in Artificial Intelligence). PSO uses ideas analogous to biological evolution and social-psychological principles of behaviour to search the space of candidate solutions for a particular task. PSO has been applied to a variety of image recognition and optimisation tasks and has achieved a certain level of success. However, there are still limitations in particle topology and representation, search algorithms and feature discovery in PSO that restrict PSO for difficult image classification tasks.

Scholarships applications close on 15 May and application forms will be available shortly from the Scholarships website. Interested applicants should complete the application form, and also contact Dr Mark Johnston.

Here is a short (< 2 min) YouTube video providing career advice from the Chief Economist at Google. And here's a NY Times article interviewing him (Hal Varian) where he says: "If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap. So what's getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis. So my recommendation is to take lots of courses about how to manipulate and analyze data: databases, machine learning, econometrics, statistics, visualization, and so on."

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.

Hot on the heels of the first of the MSOR School Colloquium Talks - Richard Arnold 's talk on earthquakes and his election night forecasting, which attracted a large audience - comes the second colloquium talk, this time by Rod Downey. Rod's talk, "When does a problem have a solution: A logician and computability theorist's view", is aimed at a very general audience, and will be accessible to beginning graduate or even advanced undergraduate students.

The talk will be given in the Cotton Club (CO339) at 4pm on Friday May 8th, with refreshments to follow. For more information about the MSOR Research Colloquia, visit http://msor.victoria.ac.nz/Main/MSORColloquia, or click on the link on the left side of this page. A short description of Rod's talk is given below:

Much of mathematics is devoted to giving solutions to equations, calculating solutions to problems, classifying structures according to invariants and the like. Natural questions arise as to when this is not possible. This talk looks at questions such as this tracing, in a idiosyncratic way, a historical line leading to modern incarnations wherein logic allows us to show that no invariants are possible for (e.g.) certain problems in group theory. This is done by showing that normal mathematical structures can be caused to emulate computation in faithful ways.

This news item is a repeat of an earlier reminder about Rod's talk.

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 was invited to take part in the Royal Society's Speakers Science Forum on Tuesday 5 May 2009 at Parliament Buildings..

Every year, the Royal Society of New Zealand runs a series of short science talks for Members of Parliament, under the auspices of the Speaker of Parliament. The series runs from March to June on selected Tuesday nights. It is timed to fit within MP's dinner hour. Each session concludes with a light buffet dinner before MPs go back into session.

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.

The Minister for Research, Science and Technology Wayne Mapp has appointed Professor of Mathematics Rod Downey to the Marsden Fund Council.

Professor Downey was awarded a James Cook Fellowship in 2008 and was the inaugural Maclaurin Fellow at the New Zealand Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (NZIMA) CoRE. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and the only New Zealand-based mathematician to give an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians.

His role on the Marsden Fund Council is to provide guidance on investments made by the fund in leading-edge research projects. He will convene the Mathematical and Information Sciences panel. The Marsden Fund Council comprises ten eminent researchers - a Chair and nine convenors. Each heads a panel in their academic field. Panels work to assess applications for funding of research projects.

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.

Professor Steffen Lempp from University of Wisconsin-Madison is visiting the School on sabbatical until December.

Steffen will primarily be working in the area of computability, with his graduate student Dan Turetsky, and MSOR Professor Rod Downey.

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.

Keeping count of our species

Just how bad is the plight of native frogs? How are kakapo or tuatara doing?

A Victoria University professor has used statistical techniques to estimate numbers in animal populations, providing accurate data that are essential to conservation efforts.

Professor Shirley Pledger, an international expert in this area, will explore how statistics has helped conservation in her inaugural professorial lecture at Victoria University next Tuesday.

Her research has built on the 'capture-recapture' method used by scientists.

"Capture-recapture is a technique that provides accurate estimates of animals, including any that remain hidden," says Professor Pledger. "It gives us data so we know what we're dealing with. For instance, do we need to concentrate more on removing predators? Where are numbers strong?"

Using the technique, scientists capture a sample of animals, mark them then release them. Later they capture another sample and use the proportion of marked animals that are recaptured to estimate the total animal population.

Professor Pledger's research has focused on improving the capture-recapture method, trying different models to accurately estimate the numbers of animals.

"Some animals are bold, some shy, some move around. Scientists either surveyed 'closed' populations, which is a kind of snapshot, or 'open' populations over a length of time that saw births, deaths and migrations. The outstanding problem for 20 years or so was that most surveys typically underestimated population sizes - now that's much less of an issue."

As well as working with biologists at Victoria and other institutions in New Zealand, Professor Pledger has strong international connections.

Her statistical work forms part of a US computer package for surveying animal populations.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Pat Walsh says Victoria's inaugural lecture series is an opportunity for professors to provide family, friends, colleagues and the wider community with an insight into their specialist area of study.

"It is also an opportunity for the University to celebrate and acknowledge our valued professors," says Professor Walsh.

Inaugural lecture - Professor Shirley Pledger
'How many animals are in the area? When counting doesn't work'
Tuesday 21 June, 6pm
Hunter Council Chamber, Level 2, Hunter Building
Victoria University, Kelburn

RSVPs essential - please email rsvp@vuw.ac.nz with 'Pledger' in the subject line or call 04 463 5810

For more information, please contact Professor Shirley Pledger on 04 463 6788 or email shirley.pledger@vuw.ac.nz

Invitation (click image below for a pdf)

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!

Peter Donelan did an interview with Kim Hill on Saturday 23 October about fractals and Benoit Mandelbrot. If you'd like to listen go to the Radio New Zealand webpage or click here for the podcast

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.

Dr. Asher Kach from the University of Connecticut has joined the school as a post-doctoral fellow. Dr. Kach will be working with Professor Downey and MSOR visitor Professor Steffen Lempp.

Dan Turetsky joins us as a postdoctoral fellow working with Noam Greenberg and Rod Downey. Dan recently received his PhD from the University of Madison, Wosconsin under the supervision or Steffen Lempp. Dan and Steffen visited us for 3 months in 2009. Dan will be here for 2 years. He works in mathematical logic particularly aspects of computability theory.

Rodney G. Downey and Denis R. Hirschfeldt: 'Algorithmic Randomness and Complexity' (Springer, November 2010)

One of the most eagerly anticipated books for some years has finally been published. It is the first book in the new CiE book series "Theory and Applications of Computability". This mammoth work is a book destined to be a standard reference work in the field for many years.

For ordering details see the Springer webpage or Amazon.

Here is the Springer page for the series.

Dr. Dalice Sim has accepted the post of statistical consultant and will begin work on 1 March 2010. Her office will be Cotton 533.

She will be available to staff and graduate students of the university for statistical consultation on research topics.

See also the Statistical Consulting Webpage.

The School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research has a new look website.

Prospective students, and students planning the next steps in their degrees, should look at pages under the "Study" tab - and should keep an eye on the Scholarships page for funding opportunities for further study.

Prospective Masters and PhD students should have a look at the list of possible thesis topics and supervisors.

Currently enrolled students can find course homepages for courses that are running now under the "Current Students" tab.

Staff and graduate students needing statistical advice can contact the statistical consultant, Dalice Sim. A link to further information is in the "Information About..." set of links on the right hand side of the page.

Professor Shirley Pledger has recently been honoured by an appointment as an International Member of the National Centre for Statistical Ecology (NCSE) in the UK. Following that appointment, the NCSE and MSOR have signed an agreement to encourage the exchange of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students to facilitate further cooperation and collaboration in the area of statistical ecology.

The School is delighted to welcome three new postdoctoral researchers.

Dr Alexander Melnikov received his two Phd's late 2012; one from Novosibirsk under the direction of Professor Sergei Goncharov, and the other from Auckland under the direction of Andre Nies and Bhakhadyr Khoussainov. He works in computability theory, specializing in computable algebra and analysis. He is here for a year on a postdoctoral fellowship to work with Professor Downey and Associate Professor Greenberg (and Dr Day when he arrives). In 2014 he will begin a 2 year fellowship at the University of California Berkeley.

Tanya Gvozdeva received her PhD from Auckland University in 2012 under the direction of Arkadii Slinko. She works in combinatorics and the mathematics of social choice. She is here for the year as a teaching fellow. She will accmpany Melnikov to Berkeley in 2014.

Rong Chen is a talented young matroid theorist who has a permanent position at Fuzhou University in China. She has been awarded a Fellowship from the Chinese government to spend one year visiting Victoria University and work with the matroid group here.

Two new books have been published by members of the School:

• "Statistical Methods for Demography and Life Insurance" by Estate Khmaladze
  Moscow: URSS, 2009.

• "The Kerr spacetime: Rotating black holes in general relativity."
  Edited by: David Wiltshire, Matt Visser, Susan Scott. Chapters by: Matt Visser, Roy Kerr, Roger Penrose, Brandon Carter, David Robinson, Ben Lewis and Susan Scott, Remo Ruffini, Fulvio Melia, Andrew Fabian and Giovanni Miniutti, Maurice van Putten, Steve Carlip, Gary Horowitz. ISBN: 9780521885126 [22 January 2009] Cambridge University Press.
  see also: http://homepages.ecs.vuw.ac.nz/~visser/book4.shtml

• ... and an honourable mention in Nature Physics Research Highlights (April 2009) for a paper in Phys Rev D. by Gabriel Abreu and Matt Visser
  "It's feasible, in quantum physics, to have a large negative energy density at a point - and with this comes all sorts of weird possibilities such as traversable wormholes and time machines. Fortunately, to stop things getting out of hand, there are constraints on average or total energy over a volume or line, such as that expressed in the 'quantum interest conjecture': overall, the energy density must be positive; negative energy density somewhere must be more than compensated for by positive energy density elsewhere. For the example of energy pulses, this means that the amount of negative energy in a pulse is constrained to be more than balanced by a larger positive-energy pulse; the time interval between such pulses is also restricted, according to the conjecture. The net energy of the two pulses, necessarily positive, is the 'quantum interest'. The quantum interest conjecture has already been proved in (1 + 1) Minkowski space, but now Gabriel Abreu and Matt Visser have taken it into more dimensions. By proving a variant of Simon's theorem for the biharmonic Schördinger equation, they have reformulated the conjecture for (3 + 1) Minkowski space. In fact, the result can be generalized to any Minkowski space that has an even number of dimensions."

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.

Throughout 2009 the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations research will be hosting one of this year's New Zealand Science, Technology and Mathematics Teaching Fellows. Frank Kane, Head of Mathematics at Wellington's Onslow College was awarded one of the prestigious fellowships in order answer the question "Where is this stuff used?". He will explore ways in which the calculus component of higher secondary mathematics is used in applications in the wider world and how its study builds at university level.

Frank has already attended the Mathematics in Industry Study Group in Wollongong, Australia, where he was part of a team looking at modelling the slumping of steel rolls. During the year he will attend courses in applied mathematics and operations research at Victoria, talk to applied mathematicians and scientists here and at other institutions in the Wellington region and pursue some case studies. Frank's primary contact in MSOR is Peter Donelan. If you would like to find out how the project is progressing then read Frank's blog.

As part of the IYA (International Year of Astronomy) Matt will give a talk on "Dark matter, dark energy, and the accelerating universe" at Te Papa, Soundings Theatre on Sunday May 24 at 12 noon. He will then lead a Cafe Scientifique style session in the coffee bar at te Papa shortly after.

This talk is part of an event which is being run by the Royal Astronomical Society and is part of the Telescope Roadshow which is supported by the Wellington Astronomical Society.

Abstract: What are "dark matter", and "dark energy", and why do most cosmologists believe in them? Are there alternatives? Are the alternatives any better?

The school holds a regular informal seminar series on matroid theory. Anyone interested in participating should contact Prof Geoff Whittle.

And also a warm welcome to our new Post Doc Carolyn Chun. Carolyn is funded by Geoff Whittle's Marsden Grant and will be working on problems in matroid representation theory.

A book won as a maths prize at Victoria University in 1944 has come home after it was spotted at a charity bookshop in England.

A volunteer at the Oxfam bookshop in Thame, Oxfordshire found the book among others donated from the estate of Professor John Ziman, who grew up in Hamilton and later studied at Victoria. The volunteer contacted the University and posted the book back to New Zealand.

As a student at what was then Victoria College, Professor Ziman won the MacMorran Prize, awarded annually to the best second-year mathematics student. He used the prize money to buy The Development of Mathematics by E T Bell, the book that turned up 67 years later.

Professor Megan Clark, Head of the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research says that she was delighted when she was contacted about the book.

"It was such a surprise to hear from the bookshop on the other side of the world and I'm delighted they got in touch to see if we would like the book for our archives. John Ziman was well-known in the UK as a physicist and wrote a number of groundbreaking books. What's more, one of our current academics, Professor Rob Goldblatt is one of his descendants so it really feels like the book has come home," says Professor Clark.

Professor Ziman, a physicist and philosopher, was interested in the role science played in politics and society.

As well as a leading career in Physics, Professor Ziman wrote extensively on how scientific research and innovation is affected by social, political and cultural values, and how science, in turn, affects society. He also argued strongly for scientists to have a greater sense of social responsibility.

After completing his PhD in mathematics and physics at Oxford, Professor Ziman lectured at Oxford and Cambridge universities. He was later a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkley and Professor at Bristol University. In 1967, he was elected to the Royal Society, London.

He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree by Victoria University in 1985.

The photos below are of Felix Barber, a third year student majoring in both mathematics and physics, who is the current holder of the MacMorran prize for Mathematics.

In this article from the Wall St Journal it is reported that the best jobs in the US are mathematician, actuary, statistician.

"Nineteen years ago, Jennifer Courter set out on a career path that has since provided her with a steady stream of lucrative, low-stress jobs. Now, her occupation -- mathematician -- has landed at the top spot on a new study ranking the best and worst jobs in the U.S..." Read more

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.

The School has entered into an agreement with the Scuola Internazionale Superiore Di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy to encourage the exchange of staff, researchers and graduate students. This builds on the collaborative research relationship that Professor Matt Visser has long had with SISSA.

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.

MSOR Associate Professor Mark McGuinness will deliver one of the 10x10 Lecture Series presentations on "Erupting Rocks and Dusts" at the University of Waikato on 22 May. The 10x10 Lectures are a series of ten speakers at ten locations in ten months, where New Zealand mathematicians talk about their work and how they are helping to find solutions to today’s problems.

More details can be found at http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/events/10-x-10-lecture-series/hamilton-may/

The School has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Statistics New Zealand to strengthen and maintain a partnership. This will promote official statistics and provide summer internships for School statistics students.

 

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.

Congratulations to Jonathan Crook on completing his Phd on "Ice growth and platelet crystals in Antarctica". Jonathan completed his PhD under the supervision of Dr Mark McGuinness.

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.

Dr Hung Le Pham and Dr Dillon Mayhew are both keynote speakers at the annual meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society in Wollongong this week, in their respective special sessions.

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.

The Biennial Forder Lecture:

Arithmetic progressions of primes

Professor Ben Green -- University of Cambridge.

A prime number is one that is divisible by exactly two numbers: itself, and one. The first few prime numbers are 2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19. The apparently random way in which prime numbers occur has fascinated people for centuries, and many attempts have been made to find some type of order in the sequence.

One of the most significant recent advances was made in 2004, when Prof. Green and his coauthor, the Fields medalist Terence Tao, proved that the sequence of prime numbers contains arbitrarily long arithmetic sequences. An arithmetic sequence of numbers is one in which each number is obtained by adding some constant to the previous number. For example, 3,7,11 is an arithmetic sequence, since each number is obtained by adding 4 to the previous number. As it happens, every number in this particular arithmetic sequence is a prime. It was a longstanding problem to show that it is possible to find arithmetic sequences of arbitrary length that are made up entirely of primes.

Prof. Green will talk about his and Prof. Tao's solution of the problem. The lecture is open to the public and will be appropriate for a non-specialist audience.

6.30pm Monday 13 September
Maclaurin LT102,
Victoria University,
Kelburn Parade

Download a poster for this lecture

Ben Green's homepage

More information on arithmetic sequences in primes

For information on the seminar, email Dillon Mayhew

The latest episode of the TVNZ7 programme "Ever Wondered" featured our very own Dr Dillon Mayhew, together with Prof Mike Steel (University of Canterbury) and Prof Andy Philpott (University of Auckland). This episode (series 2, episode 9) was on "Maths" and is now available online at http://tvnz.co.nz/ever-wondered/s2-e9-video-4426539

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.

Congratulations to Professor Estate Khmaladze who has been appointed consultant to a 2 year United States NSF funded project: Recovery of Functions via Moments: Hausdorff case awarded to West Virginia University.

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.

It is with great regret that we announce the death of Dr Wang who died unexpectedly on the 22nd October. He will be greatly missed by his students, colleagues, friends and family.

Tributes to Dr Wang can be left on http://www.tributes.co.nz/ViewMyTribute.aspx?id=5827

The funeral will be held 11am Monday 1st November at the Karori Crematorium. Followed by a wake at Victoria University.

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 Dr Thomas Suesse, a former PhD student in the School who has been appointed to a lectureship at the University of Wollongong. Dr Suesse was supervised by Dr I-Ming Liu with whom he has subsequently published a number of papers.

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.

Four members of the Statistics and Operations Research Group (Ivy Liu, Richard Arnold, Nokuthaba Sibanda [pictured, catching prawns in the rain], and Shirley Pledger) recently attended the 2009 regional meeting of the International Biometrics Society (IBS), held in Taupo in December.

The conference programme covered a wide range of subjects in biostatistics - with Victoria researchers presenting work on Capture-Recapture, Bayesian infrerence in genetics and analysis of multiple response data in contingency tables. The conference particularly attracted researchers from NZ and Australia (some of whom had never seen rain before), as well as others from around the world.

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.