CARMA stalwart John Giles passed away on 30th December 2024, one day short of his 91st birthday. John had a deeply significant influence on Australian mathematics, on mathematics at the University of Newcastle (where his long influence included being Head of School), and indirectly in the formation of CARMA. John supervised Brailey Sims, who was instrumental in bringing Jon Borwein to Newcastle.

Below is the message shared by the AustMS last week, which includes funeral details.

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From the AustMS Secretary, Deborah Jackson:

Dear Members

We are saddened to report that John Giles, one of the pioneers of functional analysis in Australia, passed away last Monday, one day shy of his 91st birthday.

He had been an AustMS member since 1960.

He served the University of Newcastle for many years, completing his PhD there in 1969, and supervising seven PhD students.

He also served on the AustMS Council 1978-82, 1985-86 and 1989-92.

He was Vice President of AustMS 1982-84 and Editor of the Gazette 2001-03.

The funeral is planned for Wednesday 22nd January at eleven in the morning.

It is expected to be held at Christ Church Cathedral in Newcastle and then afterwards at the Hippocrates Hall.

Our condolences to his family and friends.

A Conference on zerodimensional symmetry will be held in Honour of Professor George Willis (former CARMA Director), near Newcastle in Australia in the week of November 18-22, 2024. Registration will be available soon at: https://sites.google.com/view/willisfest2024 If you would like to be kept in the loop about this event, please write to the organisers at willisfest2024@gmail.com

A new physical home for CARMA is in the works, in Victoria. Renovations will commence soon on a premises in Johnson Street, Maffra.

CARMA Exec member Associate Professor Michael Donovan, of the Gumbaynggir people, has been appointed PVC-Indigenous at Latrobe University. This well-deserved honour follows Michael's earlier recent award of a Fullbright fellowship in which he travelled to Hawaii to learn from the people and education systems there and ways in which they work to inspire Indigenous students. For more details on Michael's prestigious appointment, see: https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2022/release/pro-vice-chancellor-indigenous-appointed

September 2022 sees an art exhibition and book launch, both in Newcastle, by CARMA member Keith Nesbitt.

The exhibit, alongside Paul Foley and Chris Buller, opens on Friday 9th September, and runs until 25th September at "Back to Back Galleries".

The launch of Paintings by Number will be held from 6-7 pm on Thursday 15th September, in Newcastle Library, Lovett Gallery. Entry is free but bookings are essential: click here for details.

The Gavin Brown Prize for best paper was awarded this week for the paper "Dispersion relations, power laws, and energy loss for waves in the marginal ice zone" by Mike Meylan, Luke Bennetts, J Mosig, W Rogers, M Doble and M Peter. This is another accolade for CARMA member Mike Meylan and his colleagues whose work in sea-ice is well known in Australia and internationally. See https://austms.org.au/awards-grants/awards/gavin-brown-best-paper-prize/gavin-brown-prize-winners/ for the citation summary, which begins by noting "The paper has had a significant impact on the waves-in-ice field and beyond. In particular, the discovery of power-law relationship has modified the approach to data analysis and theory, and set a new benchmark for theoretical contributions to numerical prediction models, such as the WAVEWATCH III third-generation spectral wave model and the CICE sea ice model."

The first “University of Newcastle & Industry Emerging Technology Research Collaboration Meeting” was held via zoom 24/9/21; with over 80 company representatives. Mr. Bradd Perkins (Leading Edge), Business Director Newcastle/Hunter region organised, together with A/Prof Stephan Chalup (CARMA), speaking on “AI, Data Science & Machine Learning, and the Idea of a Hunter Silicon Valley”; Dr Alex Mendes (DHOS Marketing & Outreach, SIPS), speaking on “Collaborating with our researchers and how to access our students - Government grants, PhD, Honours, Final Year Projects, Work Integrated Learning, Industry Experience, and job ads.”; and A/Prof Jamil Khan (School of Engineering) speaking on “Wireless Sensor Network, IoT, Connected Systems and Energy Harvested Networks”. Prof Craig Wheeler – Assistant Dean – Research (Industry Engagement) in CESE introduced the event. Professor George Willis and Mrs. Joanne Wust (CEO 4Tel) were present as CARMA/Hunter Silicon Valley Initiative contacts. Plans include ARC Linkage.

The first “Indigenising University Mathematics” global Symposium was hosted by CARMA and Wollotuka on Zoom, 20-21 Sept 2021 AEST. Mathematicians and colleagues (Indigenous & non-Indigenous) came together from Australia, North America, Hawaii, New Zealand and the UK. The event was opened by the Head of the Wollotuka Institute Kathy Butler, UoN PVC Indigenous Strategy & Leadership Nathan Towney, CARMA organiser Judy-anne Osborn, AustMS Deputy President Geoff Prince and Statistical Society Australia President Jessica Kasza. Participants talked together about the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of Indigenising Mathematics, especially in University settings. Pairs of leaders (Indigenous & non-Indigenous) led themes: Reimagining the living present, Country & Mathematics, Language & Oral Traditions, Indigenous Mathematics, Love & Pedagogy and Traditional Knowledge. Complementing these were a presentation by Rowena Ball on Decolonisation, several community contributions and a closing (for now) address by Bob Morgan.

The first of the new round of APRInterns across Australia was awarded to PhD candidate Fillipe Georgiou. Fillipe is currently working with Prof Natalie Thamwattana to predict locust outbreaks better. Fillipe is our fourth ARP intern from the mathematics discipline at the University of Newcastle. Fillipe will work with the company "Climate Risk" for three months, helping improve efficiency in climate impact modelling. Last year, we had Dr Ben Maldon, who worked with "Hyper Q Aerospace. Earlier this year, we had Dr Riya Arrgwahl who, after completing a project with Veris, was employed by them as an innovation engineer. Currently, we also have Kyle Stevens, who is about to finish his internship with Lake Macquarie City Council. All of these interns have been mentored by A/Prof Mike Meylan. Mike's expertise is in using mathematics to understand real-world problems. He is passionate about supporting PhD students to gain industry experience and apply cutting-edge research in an industry setting.

Congrats to the team who have recently submitted an expression of interest for a national centre on "Mathematical Thinking". The application is led by Laureate Professor George Willis with support from various CARMA members including Associate Professor Stephan Chalup and Professor Florian Breuer both playing key roles. Other Universities involved as nodes include Monash, UNSW, Sydney, Western Sydney and Macquarie. The centre plan is ambitious, spanning cognitive science, pure mathematics, industrial applications, and consequences for the broader society. Pulling together such a rich application and collaboration is an achievement at any time, and the more so in the very challenging times we find ourselves. Well done to the team!

Two recent graduates, Dr Matt Skerritt and Dr Riya Aggarwal, have each recently commenced full time jobs. Matt is a lecturer in mathematics and cyber security at RMIT, and Riya is working for Veris, a national surveying, digital and spatial planning business. Congratulations to Matt and to Riya.

The CARMA Colloquia are returning for 2021 with Michael Assis acting as the convenor. Regular time will be Thursdays 4–5pm in SR118 and also viewable online via Zoom. See the events page for information on upcoming talks.

Congratulations are also due to CARMA members Stephan Chalup and David Pontin for their success in the ARC's Discovery Projects 2021 grant round.

Stephan and colleagues were funded for two projects, "Estimating the Topology of Low-Dimensional Data Using Deep Neural Networks" and "Novel Techniques for Uncoordinated Massive Access in the Internet of Things", while David and his collaborators were awarded funding for "Understanding the sources of the slow solar wind".

CARMA PhD student Fillipe Georgiou has been awarded the "best student presentation" award at the 2020 Computational Techniques and Applications Conference. This conference provides a forum for researchers interested in the development and use of computational methods applied to engineering, scientific and other problems. Congratulations Fillipe!

On 18th July 2020, CARMA mathematician Bishnu Lamichhane gave a talk to the Nepalese Mathematics Society on "My Research Journey in Mathematics".

On 20th April 2020, CARMA mathematician Bishnu Lamichhane gave a talk to MSI at ANU, on "Mixed Finite Element Methods for 4th and 6th Order Partial Differential Equations".

Laureate Prof. George Willis has recorded a 10-minute video, "The mathematics of symmetry", for the Children's University describing his work on symmetry. The target audience is 7 to 14 years of age.

Watch the video

The inaugural CARMA Maths Art Competition is now open!. Entries close 31st August.

CARMA's Mike Meylan jointly won the Cherry Ripe Prize, along with with Prof. Peter Taylor from the University of Melbourne, at this year's ANZIAM conference. The prize is awarded to the best presentation by an established academic voted by students.

The recent MISG workshop in Newcastle was featured in a story in the Newcastle Herald.

In this year's round of ARC discovery projects, CARMA members Jeff Hogan and Mike Meylan have been successful in their (separate) bids for research funding. Jeff's project will advance "the hydrodynamic fractionation of particles on the basis of density", while Mike and colleagues will model ocean waves in the ice-covered ocean, and implement it in a large-scale sea-ice model.

CARMA member Philipp Braun has won the best poster prize at this year's AMSI Optimise conference for his poster (with Chris Kellett and Steve Weller) on "Climate Economics on the Example of the DICE Model: An Optimal Control Perspective". Congratulations!

The 2018 winner of the Mahony—Neumann—Room prize for best paper in the ANZIAM Journal was two papers and one was by F. Aragon Artacho, J. Borwein and M. Tam for one of their 2014 papers. All three authors were members of CARMA at the time!

Michael Coons won the prize last year with some colleagues from Waterloo. This means that in the three years of the prize so far, CARMA produced two of the four winning papers.

Congratulations to A/Prof Peter Howley who has received word from the President of the Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) advising that he has been awarded the 2018 SSA Service Award. The award will be given at the Australian Statistics Conference (ASC) which this year is in conjunction with the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics in Melbourne in August. Well done Peter!

CARMA member Dr Minh Dao was the winner of the AMSI Optimise 2018 Best Poster Competition for his poster entitled "Optimisation Design for Energy-Efficient Downlink Cloud Radio Access Networks". Hosted by the University of Melbourne, AMSI Optimise was held from 18-22 June 2018 with the conference themes of decision making under uncertainty and humanitarian applications. Congratulations Minh!

CARMA member Elena Levchenko is a co-organising for the symposium "Theory and simulation in physics for materials applications" at this year's European Materials Research Society (E-MRS) meeting in Warsaw, Poland. For full details and to submit abstracts, visit the symposium web page.

Elena's Acta Materialia paper "Composition dependence of diffusion and thermotransport in Ni-Al melts: A step towards molecular dynamics assisted databases" has been selected as a key scientific article contributing to excellence in science and engineering research It is featured in the materials engineering section of Advances in Engineering.

The Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications awarded the 2014 Euler medal to Prof. Brian Alspach. This award is for "distinguished career contributions to combinatorics", and he received the medal at the the 5th International Combinatorics Conference at Monash University on 17 December 2017.

Michael Coons, along with two collaborators, has won the inaugural Mahony-Neumann-Room Prize for the best paper published in the Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society during the period 2011-2016.

Their paper was:

Jason P. Bell, Michael Coons and Kevin G. Hare, "The minimal growth of a k-regular sequence", Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society 90(2) (2014), 195-203

The prize was announced during the opening session of the Australian Mathematical Society Annual Meeting at Macquarie University on Tuesday 12th December 2017.

Ali Eshragh has been awarded the Australian Society for Operations Research (ASOR) Rising Star Award in 2017 (details on their website) at the International Congress on Modelling and Simulation Conference’s Gala Dinner in Hobart.

Congratulations to all of the CARMA members who have received promotions!

Prof. Chris Kellett, Prof. Steve Weller, Senior Lecturer Elena Prieto and Senior Lecturer Ali Eshragh.

CARMA member Michael Coons has been invited and since accepted a position on the Programme Committee for the 2019 AustMS meeting to be held at Monash.

The postgraduate students in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences celebrated their research through an artistic exhibition curated by Dr Michael Gladys. First prize went to CARMA member Matt Skerritt for his artwork titled "Relative Reflections", second prize went to Alaa Yousif for his work titled "Science Assimilates Nature". The peoples choice award went to CARMA member Scott Lindstrom with "Rotation of Hyperbolic Space”. Congratulations Matt and Scott!

Brian Alspach has been one of the most influential graph theorists over the last five decades. He has contributed pioneering works, fundamental discoveries, and celebrated results in areas including: tournaments and digraphs; permutation groups and their actions on graphs; decompositions and factorizations; Hamilton and other cycles; and searching and sweeping strategies in graphs. Brian’s example and leadership have set the standard for collaborative research; he has been a tremendous influence in the mathematical community. He is a talented mentor, with a knack for encouraging young people. Even a brief meeting with him has proven influential in numerous careers, but Brian goes far out of his way to provide further encouragement. In summary, Brian is widely recognised as a distinguished researcher, a generous collaborator, a talented and dedicated mentor, and an energetic leader in the mathematical community.

Bishnu has been elected as the new chair of ANZIAM's Computational Mathematics Group.

Current CARMA visitor Professor Michael Bennett is one of Canada's top mathematicians and an expert in number theory, specifically in the area of Diophantine approximation. In addition to his research, Prof Bennett has been a proponent for equity and sustainability practices in mathematics—during Prof Bennett's recent sentence as Head of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia, he ended the need for adjuncts (sessionals) by employing fair hiring practices. Professor Michael Bennett is the current President of the Canadian Mathematical Society. He is visiting Michael Coons.

Gavin Brown Best Paper Prize winner Professor George Willis from the University of Newcastle was recognised for his outstanding joint original research paper with Yehuda Shalom, Commensurated subgroups of arithmetic groups, totally disconnected groups and adelic ridgidity, Geom Funct. Anal. 23 (2013) no. 5, 1631-1683.

"I thank the Australian Mathematical Society for this great honour. I am particularly pleased to receive the Gavin Brown Prize because my first job was working with him. One of the good pieces of advice that he gave me was to broaden my interests, and I think that I have followed that advice in this work," said Professor Willis.

CARMA PhD student Scott Lindstrom received an honourable mention for the Bernhard Neumann Prize for his presentation in the Annual Meeting of Australian Mathematical Society in Canberra last week. Congratulations Scott!

David Bailey, Jonathan Borwein, Andrew Mattingly, and Glenn Wightwick received the 2017 Conant Prize for their article "The Computation of Previously Inaccessible Digits of π2 and Catalan's Constant," Notices of the AMS, August 2013.

Levi L. Conant was a mathematician and educator who spent most of his career as a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. More information about him is available on the AMS website.

Dr Amir Salehipour (CARMA) and Miss Leila M. Naeni (School of Built Environment, UTS, and School of EE&CS, UON) won the prestigious 2016 Project Management Achievement Award (PMAA) - Research Category, awarded by Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM), for conducting outstanding research in the context of enhancing the well-known earned value (EV) technique with advanced mathematics and statistics tools in order to overcome several limitations of the earned value, particularly, when determining acceptable levels of deviations from the baseline plan. In the study, which we published in Journal of Construction Engineering and Management (ERA 2010 ranked A*), we concluded that implementing the developed tools together with the traditional tools noticeably improves the project controlling scheme (http://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%29CO.1943-7862.0001078).

The Statistical Society of Australia (SSA), via its Statistics Education Section, is hosting a 2-day colloquium and workshop (2-3 June 2016, UTS) to develop a platform for the transformation of Statistics Education in Australia, in response to an increasingly massive demand for statisticians and an equally massive shortfall in supply. Please consider the program at STEMS2016.com; it includes speakers & representatives from: Harvard University; Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet; Commonwealth Bank of Australia; Qantas; ACARA, ACEMS, ABS, AMSI, NSW BOSTES, SSA; and will include a Panel Discussion session including Q&A floor discussion, followed by exploration of ideas and a workshop to develop and initiate a plan of action for progressing Statistics education in Australia.

FREE seminar 1 June at UTS:
Speaker: Dr Peter Howley
Details: https://stems2016.com/pre-colloquium-seminar/

A project which aims to improve statistical literacy has been awarded Higher Education Participation Programme National Priority Pool funding, It will "create, evaluate and disseminate a set of digital media resources designed both for low SES, culturally diverse and remotely located students".

The team is led by CARMA's Peter Howley, Elena Prieto, Ali Eshragh and Kath Holmes.

CARMA PhD student Matthew Tam has been awarded an Australian Mathematical Society Lift-off Fellowship. Tam will use the fellowship to visit Dr Francisco Aragón Artacho at the University of Alicante in Spain. A list of Lift-Off Fellows, to date, can be found at the Lift-Off Fellowship website.

CARMA PhD student Muhammad Ilyas was selected as one of the best student presenters at EMAC in Adelaide, receiving a Highly Commended award in the William Finlay Blyth Prize.

You will be working as part of an international team led by Associate Professor Murray Elder as part of the ARC 2016 Discovery Project "The language complexity of problems in algebra and logic". More information see http://www.austms.org.au/Jobs/Academic988.html

David Bailey has been recognised for his work on The NAS Parallel Benchmarks.

The Supercomputing Conference (SC15) Test of Time Award Committee has recognized “The NAS Parallel Benchmarks - Summary and Preliminary Results” written by D. Bailey, E. Barszcz, J. Barton, D. Browning, R. Carter, L. Dagum, R. Fatoohi, P. Frederickson, T. Lasinski, R. Schreiber, H. Simon, V. Venkatakrishnan, and S. Weeratunga from the SC91 conference as the SC15 Test of Time Award (ToTA) paper for this year.

The ToTA recognizes an outstanding paper that has appeared at the SC conference and has deeply influenced the HPC discipline. It is a mark of historical impact and recognition that the paper has changed HPC trends.

CARMA RHD student Meks Ndii has been awarded an AustMS Lift-Off Fellowship which will enable him to travel to Florida to attend the Epidemics conference in December. Congratulations Meks!

Juliane Turner is a most deserved winner of the 2015 FSCIT Administrative Employee of the Year. Well done, Juliane!

AMSI have announced a new travel grant scheme for women (students and early career researchers) in mathematics, the "AMSI-BHP Billiton Foundation Choose Maths Travel Grants for Women". Details can be found on AMSI's website.

CARMA director Borwein has been made Western University's Distinguished Scholar in Residence and will spend March through June 2016 in that role at Western University in London Ontario.

http://ss16.amsi.org.au/ The AMSI Summer School is an exciting opportunity for mathematical sciences students from around Australia to come together over the summer break to develop their skills and networks. RMIT Melbourne January 2016 Travel Grant applications open: 13 August 2015 Travel Grant applications & 1st registration closes: 1 November 2015

http://vrs.amsi.org.au/ * the chance to work on a real research project for six weeks * travel and accommodation to attend the Big Day In student conference in Melbourne * a six-week award of \$450/week (total $2,700) APPLICATIONS CLOSE: 16 SEPTEMBER 2015

CARMA Director, Jonathan Borwein, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. "The Society is the oldest learned society in the Southern Hemisphere, tracing its origin to the Philosophical Society of Australasia, founded in Sydney in 1821." It initiated a Fellows Program in 2013.

CARMA associate, and long-time collaborator of Laureate Professor Jonathan Borwein, Bailey has been given the prestigious “Test of Time” award by the 2015 ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference. The award is for the paper “The NAS Parallel Benchmarks - Summary and Preliminary Results”, co-authored by Bailey and 12 colleagues at the NASA Ames Research Center, which appeared in the Proceedings of the SC91 conference in 1991. The annual Supercomputing Test of Time Award recognizes an outstanding paper that has previously appeared in the SC conference proceedings and has deeply influenced the discipline of high-performance computing. The award will be presented at the SC15 conference in Austin, Texas, USA, in November 2015. See further details.

The recent article It’s often the puzzles that baffle that go viral (in the Conversation of April 16 2015) has itself gone viral with over 914,000 readers so far.

Registrations are now open for the Winter School on Algebra, Geometry and Physics! Introductory lectures in the first week lead into in-depth specialist lectures in the second week. More information is available on the 2015 Winter School website.

A story about the recent AMSI Summer School appears in the latest Microbytes, the newsletter of the Faculty of Science and Information Technology. Well done Jeff and Juliane!

From AMSI:

Students from all over Australia (and one participant from Kolkata) converged on the sunny University of Newcastle for AMSI’s Summer School in the Mathematical Sciences.

Students stayed on campus for the four-week program, taking two of the eight subjects on offer, meeting employers at the careers afternoon and finding out about new research at specialist lectures.

The social side was also a big hit with students competing in a trivia night, "Murray Elder's Famous Bushwalk" and a beach party (despite the minor hiccup of a shark sighting).

Cameron received an Honourable Mention for his talk "Using Random walks to estimate the shape of Følner Sets" at the 8th Australia and New Zealand Mathematics Convention in Melbourne last week.

CARMA member Ljiljana Brankovic has been promoted to full professor. Congratulations!

CARMA PhD student Matthew Tam has been awarded one of four student prizes for his talk "Reflection Methods for Inverse Problems" at the biennial Computation Techniques and Applications Conference (CTAC) held at the ANU from December 1-3. The prizes were sponsored by the Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand.

Congratulations are due to CARMA members Michael Coons, promoted to Senior Lecturer, and Mike Meylan, promoted to Associate Professor. It's fine recognition for their hard work and great publication records.

Congratulations to Colin Reid who is among the newly announced Early Career Awards and to Deputy Dirctor George Willis who has received ARC Discovery Project funding.

New CARMA member Peter Howley is this year’s recipient of the Faculty of Science and IT 2014 Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence and Contribution to Student Learning.
This will be presented at an Awards ceremony at the Conservatorium on 8th December to which all staff are invited. Well done Peter!

Here is a new ad for the spanish lottery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xfSjDgxCRI Look carefully at the guy with the beard.

The international group theory webinar series starts this week: Jan Cannizzo (Stevens Institute of Technology) "An introduction to sofic structures" http://web.stevens.edu/algebraic/GTI/

CARMA's Mumtaz Hussain has been awarded highly competitive faculty visiting fellowship for collaborative research at the University of York and Durham University (United Kingdom).

From the University of Western Sydney:

"The Centre for Research in Mathematics at UWS (http://uws.edu.au/crm) is seeking to build its strength in Applied Mathematics. We are looking for someone who works in areas that will interact with some or all of our existing strengths in Control Theory, Mathematical Biology, and Computational Statistics, as well have the potential to collaborate with industry. We are a new Centre and hence the appointment will have the opportunity to help build the Centre’s research culture and integrate our research strengths with our undergraduate programme."

Closes: 31 August

Advertisment: Ref 868/14 at http://careers.uws.edu.au/Current-Vacancies

http://www.regio7.cat/manresa/2014/07/24/congres-matematic-nascut-manresa-dona/276831.html

From AMSI:

The full timeline for the Vacation Research Scholarship program is below.
For more information, including the ability to register for updates visit www.amsi.org.au/vrs.

June-Sept: 2014/15 VRS online applications open; advertising begins
8 Sept: Applications close
22 Sept: Overflow round 2 closes
8 Sept-29 Sept: Applications are considered & departments supply ranking
29 Sept–3 Oct: Students notified – further info about the program distributed
6–8 Oct: Letter Agreements distributed to participating departments, with 1 month turnaround for return of signed Letter Agreement and first invoice
10 Nov–28 Nov: All signed Letter Agreements, 1st instalment invoices received & further details received from students
Approx 1 Dec: Start date for student VRS projects
Approx 2nd week in Feb 2015: Big Day In (Sydney)

Registrations for the 2014 AMSI Winter School are now open. The registration deadline for students intending to apply for travel and accommodation scholarships is 2 May 2014. More information can be found via www.amsi.org.au/ws. Dates to remember

• 2 May 2014 - 1st Round registration closes, for those intending to apply for travel & accommodation scholarship
• 15 June 2014 - Registration closes

Our very own Dr Judy-anne Osborn is giving a talk in the Australian Academy of Science "Science stars of tomorrow" series on "Tipping the balance towards scientific thinking, via Zombies and Maths". More information is available at http://www.science.org.au/events/speakerseries/rs/osborn.html

CVX 101, a new MOOC (massive open on-line course) will run from January 21 to March 14, 2014. You can register (and find out a little bit about the class) at https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/CVX101/Winter2014/about The MOOC will be based on the Stanford course EE364A, which can be browsed at http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee364a/

Mathematics in Industry Study Group 2014 (MISG 2014) registrations are now open! See the website for more information: http://mathsinindustry.com/

Congratulations to Masoud Talebian, who with his co-author Garrett Van Ryzin was runner-up in the 2013 INFORMS Case and Teaching Materials Competition for their submission Markdown Management at Sports Unlimited. This is a wonderful achievement: congratulations! Details on the INFORMS Case and Teaching Materials Competition can be found at https://www.informs.org/Recognize-Excellence/INFORMS-Prizes-Awards/Case-and-Teaching-Materials-Competition Click on "Show all finalists" to see more details of Masoud and Garrett's contribution.

Rose and Borwein publish chapter in the new book, The Explainer: From Déjà Vu to Why the Sky Is Blue, and Other Conundrums. This is a collection of the best articles from The Conversation. It includes an essay by CARMA PhD student Michael Rose and CARMA director Jon Borwein.

The International Group Theory Online Seminar resumes its sessions next Thursday at noon (New York time). Schedule: Oct 3, 2013 - Dmytro Savchuk (University of South Florida); Oct 17, 2013 - Anton Klyachko (Moscow State University, Russia); Oct 31, 2013 - Inna Bumagin (Carleton University, Canada); Nov 14, 2013 - Pascal Weil (Université Bordeaux I, France). Please note that as of this Fall semester we are going to use Blackboard Collaborate software instead of Wimba Classroom for seminar broadcasting. This is going to resolve some technical issues we faced in the past. The instructions will be sent to everyone subscribed to the seminar mailing list (https://lists.stevens.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/accwebinar) and also posted on the seminar webpage at http://www.stevens.edu/algebraic/GTI/

Congratulations to Dr Masoud Talebian for his selection as a finalist for the INFORMS Teaching and Case Study competition, for his "Markdown Management at Sports Unlimited" case which has been used in teaching MATH3840 in the past. It was co-authored with Prof. Garrett van Ryzin of Columbia University.

The purpose of this annual competition is to encourage the creation, dissemination, and classroom use of new, unpublished cases in operations research and the management sciences. The finalists will be presented at a special open session of the annual INFORMS meeting and a panel of judges will select the winning entry based on these presentations. General information on the prize and last year's winners can be found at here.

The Golden Goose Awards go to two sets of award winners "whose federally funded research may not have seemed to have significant practical applications at the time it was conducted but has resulted in tremendous societal and economic benefit. Mathematicians Lloyd Shapley and David Gale (deceased) and economist Alvin Roth are being recognized for their work which led to the national kidney exchange and other programs such as the national matching program for new medical residents and hospitals. Thousands of people in the United States are living with transplanted kidneys today thanks, in large part, to a kidney donor matching program that grew out of federally funded research on matching pairs by mathematicians David Gale and Lloyd Shapley. Their work, which used marriage as a model, provided the foundation for economist Alvin Roth to develop numerous practical market applications, and their subsequent research on matching was the basis for today From the AMS website: http://www.ams.org/home/page

Each summer universities and other places put on summer schools, vacation research projects, etc.. The list for 2013/14 is available here. UPDATE: AMSI Summer School registration is now open.

Research projects for Summer students at the University of Newcastle can be found by following the link at the top of our research page.

Stanford professor Stephen Boyd will be visiting Australia in September, giving specialist talks and public lectures. Full details are on the AMSI web site.

Applications for 2013/2014 AMSI Vacation Research Scholarships are now open. Full details are available on AMSI's website.

An interview with CARMA director Jon Borwein about experimental mathematics has appeared in "International Innovation".

CARMA PhD student Matt Tam from has been awarded a 2013 Vice-Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Research Candidates and will receive an annual top-up in addition to his existing scholarships.

CARMA's Judy-anne has written a review for the movie "World War Z" for The Conversation (available here). She focuses on the seeds of science in the film, and their basis in reality.

The Alternating Reflections website is now up. A full version of our "Douglas-Rachford Methods" website is available here.

The flagship optimization journal Mathematical Programming has published two special issues in honour of the 60th birthday in May 2011 of Laureate Professor and CARMA Director Jonathan Borwein.

Volume 139, Issue 1-2, June 2013. Special Issue: Computational and Analytical Mathematics. ISSN: 0025-5610 (Print) 1436-4646 (Online).

Details and papers may be seen here.

The new version of our "Walks" website is here.

The Australian Mathematical Sciences Student Conference will be held this year at the Mathematical Sciences Institute of the Australian National University, Canberra during July 15-17. The primary aim of the conference is to bring together Australian postgraduate and honours students of the mathematical sciences and enable them to communicate their work in afriendly and informal atmosphere that will facilitate dialogue and encourage collaboration.
See the conference website for more information.

Registration for the Society's annual conference, to be held at the University of Sydney from 30 September to 3 October 2013, is now open at http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/austms2013/.

This year’s Winter School, hosted by the University of Queensland, runs from 24th June until 5th July. It offers a number of mini-courses relating to the theme Mathematics of Planet Earth. Mini-courses in the first week are numerical methods on GPUs, large-scale inversion for geophysical exploration, and dynamical systems & singular perturbation. Building on these, the second week offers mini-courses on mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, regularization of inverse problems in geomathematics, and optimisation for nature conservation. For more information, visit www.amsi.org.au/WS13.php.

15-17 July 2013 (ANU) The goal of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Student Conference is to bring together postgraduate and honours students in the mathematical sciences from around Australia, enabling them to communicate their work, facilitating dialogue, and encouraging collaboration, all in a friendly and informal atmosphere. More info at the ANU website.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7xPo1YXzY Museum of Mathematics http://momath.org/

The International Group Theory Online Seminar resumes its sessions in the Spring 2013 with the talk "On the elementary theory of finitely generated nilpotent and polycyclic groups" by Mahmood Sohrabi (Stevens Institute of Technology) on Thursday, February 14, 2013 at noon (New York time). All information about the seminar can be found at http://www.stevens.edu/algebraic/GTI/

Natashia Boland has been selected for the ARC College Panel of Experts from 2013. This is great recognition for one of our top professors.

Another exhibition at the intersection of art and science, this time in physics. Details here.

The course, MATH1120, will be offered over a condensed five week period during January and February, 2013. This specially created mid-summer semester allows students who have completed MATH1110 to continue on to complete MATH1120 over the summer break so that they can start the new University year in line with their peers. Enrolments close Monday 17 December, 2012. Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/midsummermaths for more info.

Web sites for CARMA-run or related meetings are now gathered together on our CARMA Meetings page.

The Australian website for Mathematics of Planet Earth is now up. Check it for events of interest for next year's programme.

The School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences has a vacancy for a lecturer in mathematics. Details here. Applications close on 28th November.

Additionally, the English Language and Foundation Studies Centre has a position open for an associate lecturer in mathematics.

The first talk for the 2012/13 series is Doron Puder (Hebrew University, Israel) "Measure preserving words are primitive" Thursday, Sep 13, Noon New York Time. Details: http://www.stevens.edu/algebraic/GTI/ Sure in Australia its when you are stumbling home from the pub after the CARMA colloquium and dinner Thursday night, but you can always watch the recordings the next day or any time after. This is a seriously active example of online communication and collaboration in mathematics -- the technology required is a computer with an internet connection and java (any old version, err, iPads not allowed). If anyone wants to watch the recordings together a day or week after in a group, let me know and we could set something up. Murray

As part of the CMA's Special Year on Inverse Problems, there will be an international Symposium on Regularization from November 19 to 24 at the ANU. It is being co-sponsored by the CMA, ANU, and AMSI. More information is available on the symposium website.

Check out the latest edition of the Australian Maths Society Gazette for articles by Murray Elder on self-similar groups and James Wan on Legendre polynomials and series for 1/pi http://www.austms.org.au/Gazette+Volume+39+Number+3+July+2012

From AMSI:

The 11th AMSI Summer School will be held from 7th January to 1st February 2013 at The University of Melbourne. The School is an exciting opportunity for students to improve their mathematical skills and meet other students. The program is packed with additional events - BBQs, guest lectures, a careers session, the annual dinner and more.

Registration for the school is now open at http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~amsi2013/. Participants are advised to register and make travel arrangements early as Melbourne is a popular destination in January.

A large number of travel and accommodation scholarships are available, please indicate whether you are applying for these when you register.

All postgraduate students (as well as staff) are welcome, even if you have attended an AMSI summer school in the past.

The School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences has a vacancy for a lecturer in mathematics. Details here.

CARMA and MAPS are holding an event "Celebrating Our Outreach in the Mathematical Sciences" on Friday, 17th August. For details please see the event page.

A Mathematics Enrichment program for Year 9 and 10 students will begin on Wednesday July 25th, 4-6PM. The first topic will be `The next dimension (fractals and higher dimensions)'. The sessions will then be held every second Wednesday throughout the school term. Teachers who have students who might be interested should email Sally Strang, Sally.Strang@newcastle.edu.au.

The recent CARMA research paper (by Aragon, Bailey, Borwein and Borwein) using "random" walks to study the digits of numbers like $\pi$ is featured in a Wired blog post by Samuel Arbesman. A similar post has also appeared in the Japanese edition of Wired, where it has reached the first position both in the ranking of news and in the hottest topic list. It is also discussed at The Aperiodical in an article by Christian Perfect (and also Lawrence Berkeley Lab posting). It is in press with the Mathematical Intelligencer.

CARMA student Michael Rose described his work on fractal box-integral models of rat brains based on work with Richard Crandall (Apple and Reed), David Bailey (Lawrence Berkeley Labs) and Jon Borwein (CARMA) to win the Faculty of Science and Information Technology's final of the Three-Minute Thesis competition.
On September 14 he will compete in the University of Newcastle finals, hoping to go on to the Australian championship.
Entrants are allowed a single slide to represent their work. You can see Michael's poster here.

A set of articles by Kurt Mahler has been relocated to the CARMA website from SFU, containing many full-text articles.

On Monday the 12th of March, 2012, the Centre for Optimal Planning and Operations (C-OPT) was officially launched in the Great Hall (Purdue Room) at the University's Callaghan Campus. The Centre is affiliated with the Priority Research Centre for Computer-Assisted Research Mathematics and its Applications (CARMA) and focuses on expanding industry-motivated and industry-linked research, primarily in the infrastructure, transport, and logistics sectors.

The event included seminars by leading academic and industry experts in the area of optimisation and business analytics and was attended by representatives of many local and national companies and academics from several of the top universities in Australia.

The programme of the launch can be found here.

Registrations for the Australian Mathematical Society's annual conference, to be held at the University of Ballarat from 24th to 27th September 2012, are now open at www.ballarat.edu.au/austms2012.

Margaret Throsby from ABC Classic FM will be interviewing Professor Celia Hoyles live on air on Wednesday 15th February, 12:00-1:00pm AEDT. Margaret is one of Australia's most popular and admired broadcasters, with a career encompassing both radio and television.

Professor Hoyles is the former mathematics advisor to the UK Government. She recently spoke at the AMSI national forum, Maths for the future: Keep Australia competitive, about measures employed in the UK that have improved standards, reversed teacher shortages and increased enrolments in the mathematical sciences.

For information on how to listen in your area, visit http://www.abc.net.au/classic/program/midday/.

"The impact of the event was successful beyond expectation and we are looking to building upon this momentum, addressing issues that affect the education pipeline of Australia's mathematically-skilled workforce.
Professor Geoff Prince
Director, AMSI"

This year, AMSI is again co-ordinating a set of honours courses in mathematics. These are offered via the Access Grid by a variety of universities around Australia. For details, see their 2012 subject offerings page.

With ANZIAM 2012 underway, the website for ANZIAM 2013, hosted by CARMA, is now live.

For visitors from the US, CARMA will be (gently) participating in the SOPA Blackout Day (Jan 18th). See the effect here. Read more here, here and here (for example).

Normality appears to have been restored. Any lingering issues will be dealt with over the next few days. Nice quick work, IT Services: thanks!

3 Jan 2012: CARMA is currently experiencing some technical problems with its servers. Most of our web sites (eg. the ISC, DocServer and events pages) are off-line. Due to the Univerity's Christmas close-down, most of these issues will remain with us until some time next week.

The CARMA Advancement and Outreach Committee has been formed. Read more here. Also visit our Outreach page.

Jeff was a winner of a 2011 Faculty of Science and IT Teaching and Learning Award.

Well done to CARMA Member Mirka Miller who won the 2011 Vice-Chancellor's Award for Supervision Excellence.

Congratulations are due to Murray Elder (again!), on his promotion to lecturer. An outstanding achievement in the short time he has been with us.

Fran Aragon has created a 1.55 gigapixel image (45469 by 34128 pixels) of a walk on the base-4 digits of $\pi$. You can browse it at the Gigapan website.

Congratulations to Dr Murray Elder and Dr Faram Engineer. Dr Elder has been awarded an ARC Future Fellowship, and Dr Engineer has been awarded an ARC Early Career Reseacher Award (DECRA). These are highly competitive schemes, with only 4 Future Fellowships and 3 DECRAs awarded University-wide. Well done to both Murray and Faram.

AMSI is pleased to announce that the first of a series of articles on the Clay Millenium Problems has been published today in The Conversation: http://theconversation.edu.au/millenium-prize-the-navier-stokes-existence-and-uniqueness-problem-4244. The remainder will be published on Tuesdays and Thursdays (seven articles in all). AMSI was commissioned by The Conversation to produce these articles and I would like to thank Jim Denier (Navier Stokes) Hyam Rubinstein (Poincare conjecture), Arun Ram (Hodge conjecture), Daniel Delbourgo (Birch & Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture), Marcel Jackson (P vs NP), Wadim Zudilin and Ole Warnaar (Riemann hypothesis) and Michael Murray, Alan Carey and Peter Bouwknegt (Yang-Mills) and AMSI's Emma Bland for delivering these wonderful and accessible pieces.

Congratulations to Pejman Rowshan Farzad and James Wan on being awarded a Faculty Award for Outstanding Postgraduate (Research) Student Achievement for 2011.

Applications for Research in Mathematics Summer Vacation Scholarships are open until Tuesday, 15 November 2011. Details here. There are also University scholarships, which close on 17th November. Details here.

Conference website: http://carma.newcastle.edu.au/jonfest/

Congratulations to Mitchell Metcalfe and Matt Tam on being awarded AMSI Vacation Research Scholarships.

Matt Skerritt and Jon Borwein's book "An Introduction to Modern Mathematical Computing: With Maple" has been published. Read the university's press release here.

Congratulations to Sebastian Ruther, who has just returned from the recent 51st AGIFORS symposium http://www.agifors.aero/symposium/2011/ where he won the premier award of the symposium, for "Best Contribution". This award is for the best talk overall, and the one which reflects work most likely to make a contribution to the airline industry. This is a really fantastic achievement, as he was up against some very experienced and senior speakers. His talk was entitled "Integrating aircraft routing with crew pairing and tail number assignment".

ScienceDaily press release on Bailey-Borwein AMS Notices article on Exploratory computation.

From the UofN's Alumni Magazine: download PDF.

James Wan has been awarded the 2011 BH Neumann Prize for his talk Legendre Polynomials and Ramanujan-like series for $1/\pi$, joint research with H H Chan and Wadim Zudilin. See http://www.austms.org.au/The+Bernhard+Neumann+Prize.

The 2011 ISSAC ACM-SIGSAM Distinguished Student Author Award has been given to Armin Straub for his paper Special Values of Generalized Log-sine Integrals (with Jonathan Borwein). See http://www.sigsam.org/awards/index.phtml.

The ANZIAM 2012 Conference will be held in Warrnambool, Victoria, from 29th Jan--2nd Feb, 2012. Details at ANZIAM 2012.