Congratulations to Statistics Graduate Diploma student Ray Tobler and his supervisor PersonTitle:NokuthabaSibanda: 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.
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 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 pursu...
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. 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" ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 base...
Professor Downey will receive a 2009 VUW Award for Research Excellence on 25 March 2009. Congratulations to Rod!
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..." R...
Antonio Montalbán, recently a Post Doctoral fellow of Victoria University under Person:RodDowney, 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 fie...
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 Person:RodDowney. Congratulations Selwyn!
Hot on the heels of the first of the MSOR School Colloquium Talks Person:RichardArnold 's talk on earthquakes and his election night forecasting, which attracted a large audience comes the second colloquium talk, this time by Person:RodDowney. 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 acces...
Two new books have been published by members of the School: * "Statistical Methods for Demography and Life Insurance" by Person:Estate Khmaladze Moscow: URSS, 2009. * "The Kerr spacetime: Rotating black holes in general relativity." Edited by: David Wiltshire, Person:MattVisser, Susan Scott. Chapters by: Person:MattVisser, Roy Kerr, Roger Penrose, Brandon Carter, David Robinson, ...
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.
Hot on the heels of the first of the MSOR School Colloquium Talks Person:RichardArnold 's talk on earthquakes and his election night forecasting, which attracted a large audience comes the second colloquium talk, this time by Person:RodDowney. 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 acces...
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 h...
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 Telesc...
Congratulations to Galym Akishev who has completed the requirements for his PhD with his thesis "Monadic Bounded Algebras" under the supervision of Prof Person:RobGoldblatt.
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.
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 introducto...
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.
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.
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 Person:RodDowney.
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 "Rigor...
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 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...
Following Professor Person:MattVisser '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.
The school holds a regular informal seminar series on matroid theory. Anyone interested in participating should contact PersonTitle:GeoffWhittle . 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.
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 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 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.
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 Daw...
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...
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.
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.
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 w...
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 t...
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 re...
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 compl...
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.
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 s...
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!
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.
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.
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 t...
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 ...
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 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.
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 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 journ...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 det...
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!
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...
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.
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.
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).
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 relativis...
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 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.
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...
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.
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 conservatio...
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 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.
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 Pres...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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 Resear...
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.
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," ha...
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.
Our congratulations to Dr Dillon Mayhew from the Mathematics group who has been awarded a Victoria University of Wellington Early Career Research Excellence award.
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.
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...
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.
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 recei...
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 Whitt...
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 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 Pri...
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,...
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.
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 sum...
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 D...
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, Computa...
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 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."
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.
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 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.
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 po...
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 ...
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 countri...
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 ht...
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 Fellows...
Our congratulations to MSOR PhD graduate Sione Paea, who has been appointed to a lectureship in Mathematics at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. Sione did his PhD developing a multiscale simulation method for the growth of nanocrystals in solution. He was supervised by Shaun Hendy (Physics and McDiarmid Inst, and winner of the 2012 Prime Minister’s Science Media Communication Prize) and...
The 12th Asian Logic Conference was held at Victoria in December 2011, a major international conference organised by the School in a highly successful event that attracted over 100 researchers from around the globe. The proceedings of the conference have now been published by World Scientific, in an attractive volume prepared by a team of editors including Rod Downey (chair) and Rob Goldblatt. The...
Congratulations to Michael Snook, who has successfully completed his PhD thesis, "Matroids, complexity, and computation", under the supervision of Dillon Mayhew. Michael's thesis is concerned with the study of geometrical objects called matroids, and the ability of computers to answer questions about them.
Mathematical Art Mathematical Art Victoria graduate Dr Rhiannon Hall makes interesting origami Mathematical Art as a hobby. One of her creations has been used in the school's new line of art that has been placed around the school. Rhiannon completed her undergraduate degree at Victoria University of Wellington, as well as a MSc with Prof Geoff Whittle in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and ...
Victoria researcher solves 40 year old math problem A Victoria University of Wellington mathematician has experienced his own eureka moment, solving a 40 year old mathematical problem. Professor Geoff Whittle, from Victoria’s School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, has been working with colleagues Professor Jim Geelen (Canada) and Professor Bert Gerards (Netherlands) to solve a ...
Irene Pestov Scholarship The Irene Pestov Memorial Scholarship has been set up by Vladimir, Xenia and Sviatoslav (Slava) Pestov in memory of their late wife and mother Irene Pestov, who completed her PhD in Mathematics at Victoria between 1993 and 1996. The scholarship aims to assist female students in the area of mathematical sciences or geosciences to complete their MSc or PhD thesis, by helping...
Popular maths writer to speak in Wellington The author of numerous books which have popularised mathematics to general audiences around the world will give a public lecture at Victoria University in early October. The talk by Professor Ian Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, is titled Equations that Changed the World and will reveal the extent to which civilisa...
Amanda Cameron, who recently completed her masters under Dillon Mayhew's supervision, has been awarded a "Queen Mary Principal's research studentship" to study for her PhD at Queen Mary University in London. She will be working with the combinatorics group there.
MSOR Researcher awarded Rutherford Discovery Fellowship Victoria University researchers have scooped three of this year’s Rutherford Discovery Fellowships. One of them being our very own Dr Dillon Mayhew. Dr Dillon Mayhew is a Senior Lecturer in Victoria University's School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research. After completing undergraduate studies at Victoria, he received a presti...
Success in 2013 Marsden Round Research in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research continues to go from strength to strength, with staff being awarded four Marsden grants in the 2013 round and another staff member being an associate investigator on a fifth project. Associate Professor Noam Greenberg has been awarded Marsden funding for a project on which he is joint Principal...
Prize Winners 2013 Congratulations to all the student prize winners for 2013 Prize name Recipient David Payne Memorial Prize Sarah Kennedy Geoffery A Rowan Memorial Bursary Tim Caldwell Health and Disability Intelligence Prize in Statistics Anne Anker Jenny Whitmarsh Award for Mathematics Lucy Dement and Kimberley Savill John P Good Memorial Prize Aleksa Vujicic ...
NZSA Prize Winners Victoria University Statistics student's Daniel Fernandez and Roy Costilla win Harmonic sponsored NZSA Student Prize. For the full article please see the Harmonic Website.
Victoria researchers scoop science awards Victoria University researchers Dr Noam Greenberg and Dr Simon Lamb have scooped New Zealand Association of Scientists (NZAS) awards for their contribution to science. Dr Greenberg, an Associate Professor in Victoria’s School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, is the recipient of the 2013 Research Medal, awarded for outstanding research pu...
New book from Prof Rod Downey and Michael Fellows. The field of parameterized complexity/multivariate complexity algorithmics is an exciting and vibrant part of theoretical computer science, responding to the vital need for efficient algorithms in modern society. This comprehensive and self contained textbook presents an accessible overview of the state of the art of multivariate algorithmics and ...
Master of Applied Statistics 2015 There is a growing national and international demand in government, the social and physical sciences, business and finance for statistics and quantitative analysis, which are required for interpretation of the great variety and quantity of data generated in the information age. The Master of Applied Statistics is designed to train students in a range of advanced s...
Postgraduate Study in Mathematical Logic Leading in Research The School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, is home to one of the leading Mathematical Logic research groups in the world. Recent graduates in mathematical logic have won national and international prizes for their thesis research. The group conducts research in all the...
This new volume is edited by MSOR’s Noam Greenberg, together with former MSOR post doctoral fellow Denis Hirschfeldt and two others. The book, in Cambridge’s Lecture Notes in Logic series, throws light on a broad range of approaches to the theory of computability in uncountable mathematics, a challenging but exciting new filed of research.
Alex Usvyatsov has been awarded the 2013 Shoenfield Prize the Association for Symbolic Logic. The prizes are awarded every 3 years for the best book and best article demonstrating outstanding expository writing in the field of logic published in the previous 6 years. Alex’s prize is for the article “Model theory for metric structures," based on earlier work of Alex’s with Itai Ben Yaacov (Institut...
Best jobs are in Mathematical Sciences Recent graduate Courtney Jones now a Behavioural Sciences Researcher at Opus. In its annual survey of careers, the US company CareerCast has rated three of its top four jobs (out of 200) for 2014 as Mathematician, Statistician and Actuary. The survey is based on quality of work environment, job satisfaction and employment opportunities. The report points o...
Maths skills put to test in competition Nearly a hundred mathematicians in the making from Wellington high schools were put to the test this week as they competed in a day long maths competition at Victoria University. Run jointly by the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research and the Wellington Mathematics Association, the competition gave students a chance to work on mathematic...
Turing's Legacy New book by Prof Rod Downey Turing's Legacy. This booklet can also be found online: Alan Turing was an inspirational figure who is now recognised as a genius of modern mathematics. In addition to leading the Allied forces' code breaking effort at Bletchley Park in World War II, he proposed the theoretical foundations of modern computing and anticipated developments in areas fro...
Celebrating our administrators In a double celebration, colleagues from the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, the School of Engineering and Computer Science, and the Faculty of Science got together to recognise two of our great administration team. MSOR School Manager Ginny Whatarau received the 2014 Parker Bridge Administration Professionals Award for Wellington region of...
In August last year Professor Geoff Whittle announced that he and collaborators Jim Geelen and Bert Gerards had proved the 40 year old Rota’s Conjecture on the representability of matroids over finite fields. Now a high level summary and brief history of the proof, by the three researchers, has appeared in the prestigious Notices of the American Mathematical Society. See http://www.ams.org/notices...
Social inequality has worsened over the past decade in New Zealand, a new study from Victoria University of Wellington shows. Research by Dr Lisa Marriott, an associate professor in Victoria’s School of Accounting and Commercial Law, and Dr Dalice Sim, Statistical Consultant in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, builds on a report produced by the Ministry of Social Deve...
Jasmine Hall, one of our current Masters students, recently won the Summer Gold Poster Competition this was open to anyone with a Summer Scholarship to create a poster explaining their research. Her poster was entitled "Extremal Values for Flats in Matroids" and basically just introduced the main matroid concepts in the research. The posters were split into groups according to Faculty and Jasmin...
The School warmly congratulates the winners of this year's prize for the most imaginative and effective use of mathematics or statistics in a project at the Fair, held at Victoria University in late August. The winners of the special prize, sponsored by MSOR, were Andrew Tang and Ollie Whyte, year 10 students at Scots College. Their project was entitled “The Electrolyte Challenge”. This year’s ju...
The university’s alumni magazine published an article in its Autumn 2014 edition on the success of mathematics at Victoria. Here is an extended version of that article by Professor Rod Downey, Click Here
Summer Research Scholarships are on offer across the Faculty of Science, including through the Antarctic Research Centre, Robinson Research Institute and Ferrier Research Institute. Some are externally funded and will involve students working with external organisations around Wellington. Applications for the 2014/2015 round are now open, and are due on the 1st of October. For more information ple...
Two mathematicians are among the 25 Victoria academics to be awarded Marsden Fund research grants in the 2014 round. Dimitrios Mitsotakis has been awarded a Fast Start grant (for early career researchers). His project is entitled "Numerical solution of time dependent multi dimensional nonlinear dispersive wave equations with applications to coastal hydrodynamics”. He explains the goal of the proje...
Rod Downey, one of the world’s leading experts on the theory of computation and a Professor in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, has been talking about the work of computing pioneer and Bletchley Park code breaker extraordinaire Alan Turing. An interview with Rod on Alan Turing’s life, work and influence, as well as his portrayal in the recent movie 'The Imitation game...
Over a hundred high school students were put to the test this week during a day long maths competition at Victoria University. Run jointly by the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research and the Wellington Mathematics Association, the competition gave students from ten schools around the Wellington region the chance to work on challenging mathematical problems. “It’s a great, fun ...
For the second year in a row Actuary, Mathematician and Statistician have been ranked among the 4 top careers in an annual survey run by the US company CareerCast. Topping a list of 200, the survey results rank Actuary 1st, Mathematician 3rd and Statistician 4th. Audiologist and Biological Engineer complete the top five, and Data Scientist ranked 6th. The 2014 survey also saw Actuary, Mathematicia...
Navin Patel has been awarded $5,000 towards his studies as recipient of the 2015 Cigna Actuarial Scholarship. Granted for the first time this year, the scholarship was set up by Cigna Life Insurance NZ Ltd to encourage potential students at Victoria University to consider the actuarial profession as a career path. Cigna also offers the successful candidate a potential internship at their Wellingto...
Professor Rod Downey’s edited collection of articles “Turing’s Legacy: Developments from Turing’s Ideas in Logic” has been chosen as one of the notable books on computing for 2014. The 'Annual Best of Computing’ list is compiled by Computing Reviews, part of the world’s leading computing society, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Downey’s book brings together essays by leading experts...
Please refer to the link for more information http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vbs/about/news#a291817
Since March Dillon Mayhew has started visiting Nights programme on Radio New Zealand. He has been talking to Bryan Crump about mathematics generally, while they have also discussed the new book by Cedric Villani, the death of John Nash and the Millennium Prize problems. Please see below the links to the radio broadcasts: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/nights/audio/20171635/mathematic...
What started out as a simple love of fishing for a Victoria University of Wellington researcher has led to a complex mathematical study in measuring fish populations. Determining the size of fish stocks is important for ensuring sustainable commercial operations, but also difficult to do with past models prone to bias or oversimplification. Darcy Webber has developed statistical methods and modell...
The New Zealand Mathematics and Statistics Postgraduate Conference (NZMASP), run this year by the University of Waikato in Taupo, is an annual event that provides students with the chance to present their research in a relaxed and supportive environment. NZMASP also enables students to socialize with other postgraduates from all corners of the country. This year, 12 students from Victoria Universi...
The first group of students from Victoria University of Wellington has successfully completed the country’s only university course in actuarial science. The University’s Head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics Dr Peter Donelan says actuarial science is entering a new era beyond assessing life and financial risk as governments and businesses grapple with social investment and the effects o...
On 15 February 2016 two of Victoria's astrophysics researchers presented a seminar about the first direct observation of gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes. The first ever direct observation of gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes was announced by researchers at the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Their 20 year search for gravitational waves—ripples in the fabr...
Mathematics in Industry New Zealand 2016 4 8 July 2016, at Victoria University of Welington. Co Director: PersonTitle:MarkMcGuinness Please come and join us at Victoria University of Wellington to solve interesting and vital industry challenges to help New Zealand businesses innovate and grow. The meeting is centered around a number of brainstorming problem solving working groups, applying mathe...
Rod Downey is a founder, with Veronica Becher in (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Denis Hirschfeldt (Chicago), of the international conference series Computability, Complexity and Randomness (CCR), first held in 2004 and an annual event since 2007. Rod is also on the conference series steering committee. http://math.hawaii.edu/wordpress/ccr 2016/conference series/ The 2016 meeting was recently held i...
The freezing of sea ice and exploding rocks in volcanoes may not sound like things a mathematician would worry about, but a newly appointed Professor says mathematics has taken him on a 40 year academic journey of discovery. As part of his inaugural lecture held 5 April 2016 to mark his professorial promotion, Victoria University of Wellington Professor Mark McGuiness will shed light on some of th...
A Victoria University student who will be among the first people in New Zealand to graduate in actuarial science has been awarded the 2016 Cigna Actuarial Scholarship. Please refer to this link for full story: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/news/2016/06/new degree programme student wins scholarship
These scholarships have been set up as part of the Cultivating Creative Capital work. There are 5 scholarships of 2000 dollars each. The scholarships will be awarded to students who have distinguished themselves for thinking outside the box and taking a creative approach to their studies. The scholarships will be awarded at a dinner on November 23. The deadline is just over a month away. Please re...
A Victoria University of Wellington student has been awarded a prestigious Woolf Fisher Trust scholarship worth around $300,000 for his doctoral study at the University of Cambridge. Honours student Liam Jolliffe will travel to Cambridge in the United Kingdom to study for a PhD in Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. Sir Woolf Fisher (1912 1975), co founder of Fisher and Paykel, set up hi...
Victoria University Professor of Mathematics Rod Downey has received a distinguished Humboldt Research Award for his academic contributions. Granted annually by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, the award recognises a researcher's achievements to date and is given to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact and who are expected...
A postdoctoral fellow from Victoria’s School of Mathematics and Statistics has been awarded the Stieltjes Prize for 2015, which recognises the best PhD in Mathematics in the Netherlands. Rutger Kuyper was awarded the prize for his thesis entitled Computability, Probability and Logic, which examines the interplay between these three subfields of mathematics. His thesis consists of three parts: comp...
Mark McGuinness was approached by Alison Ballance of Radio New Zealand to talk about his research on Cooking Crispy Cereals and the Freezing of Antarctic Sea Ice, in a short interview that was broadcast on “Our Changing World” on Thursday 13 October 2016 at 9:05pm. Listen in if you would to find out how little encouragement Mark needs to talk at some length about his work! And if you want to hear ...
New research from Victoria University of Wellington has revealed the population of the common wasp is amplified by spring weather, with warmer and drier springs often meaning more wasps and wasp stings in summer. The study, published today in the Journal of Animal Ecology, examined 23 years of data from New Zealand and 39 years from the United Kingdom, which included the annual Rothamsted Insect S...
Five Victoria University of Wellington researchers, including Professor Noam Greenberg from the School of Mathematics and Statistics, have been made fellows of the Royal Society Te Apārangi, announced today. Fellows have to be nominated and the nominations are then assessed against a number of criteria by a discipline based evaluation panel. Victoria academics make up five of the 16 new fellows....
