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December 2017 Number 131 December 2017 NEWSLETTER OF THE NEWZEALANDMATHEMATICALSOCIETY Contents PUBLISHER’S NOTICE............................ 2 EDITORIAL................................... 3 PRESIDENT’S COLUMN ........................... 4 MATHEMATICAL MINIATURE ....................... 8 CYBERMATH ................................. 9 MATHEMATICAL MISEPONYMY ..................... 10 THE AUCKLAND PROMPTUARY ...................... 12 PROFILE .................................... 16 LOCAL NEWS ................................. 18 OBITUARIES .................................. 27 REPORTS ON EVENTS ............................ 28 GENERAL NOTICES ............................. 34 NZMS NOTICES ................................ 37 PUBLISHER’S NOTICE PUBLISHER’S NOTICE This newsletter is the official organ of the New Zealand Mathematical Society Inc. This issue was edited by Miguel A Moyers Gonzalez´ and Phillip L Wilson. Editorial enquiries and items for submission to this journal should be submitted as plain text or LATEX files with “NZMS newsletter” in the title of the email to [email protected] templates are available upon request from the editors. The official address of the Society is: The New Zealand Mathematical Society, c/- The Royal Society of New Zealand, P.O. Box 598, Wellington, New Zealand. However, correspondence should normally be sent to the Secretary: Emily Harvey M.E PO Box 331297 Takapuna 0740 Auckland New Zealand [email protected] NZMS Council and officers PRESIDENT Astrid an Huef VICE PRESIDENT Vivien Kirk SECRETARY Emily Harvey TREASURER Bruce van Brunt COUNCILLORS Astrid an Huef (2011–2018), Florian Beyer (2014–2017), Bruce van Brunt (2011–2017), Shaun Cooper (2013–2019), Emily Harvey (2013–2019), Vivien Kirk (2015–2018), Stephen Marsland (2016–2019), Mark McGuinness (2012–2018), Rua Murray (2014–2017). Other positions of responsibility MEMBERSHIP SECRETARY John Shanks NEWSLETTER EDITORS Miguel Moyers and Phil Wilson LEGAL ADVISOR Peter Renaud ARCHIVIST Peter Donelan WEBMASTER Boris Baeumer Correspondents Mike Plank ANZIAM Kevin Broughan University of Waikato (Mathematics) Richard Brown Massey University (IFS) Richard Clarke University of Auckland (Engineering Science) Shaun Cooper Massey University (INMS, Albany) Peter Donelan Victoria University of Wellington (MSOR) Jorg¨ Hennig University of Otago (Mathematics and Statistics) Steffen Klaere University of Auckland (Statistics) Gunter¨ Steinke University of Canterbury (Mathematics) Garry Tee University of Auckland (Mathematics) Wenjun Zhang AUT (SCMS) Web Sites NZMS homepage: nzmathsoc.org.nz (Webmaster: [email protected]) The newsletter is available at: nzmathsoc.org.nz/?newsletter ISSN 0110-0025 2 NZMS Newsletter No. 131 EDITORIAL Welcome to the final Newsletter issue of 2017, which features a broad range of articles and opinion pieces, as well as reports and notices about upcoming events. Of particular interest is Astrid an Huef’s final President’s Column of her Presidency of the NZMS, on page 4. We are sure we speak for everyone reading this Newsletter when we thank Astrid for her wonderful service to the Society. Astrid’s column is her President’s Report for 2017, which also includes a report of prizes, awards, and fellow- ships bestowed at the NZMS Colloquium in Auckland, December 2017. We have illustrated this part of the report with some photographs from the event. It is a real pleasure to put together issues like this one, full as it is with ideas and reports from a busy Society. We have enjoyed our two years as co-Editors of the Newsletter, and will edit the three issues to appear in 2018. Please get in touch with us if you are interested in taking over the Editorship from the first issue of 2019. Building on the sterling work of our predecessors, we can report that the typesetting is mostly painless, and that correspondents and contributors are usually only too keen to supply their words. Finally, what is your opinion of the Newsletter? As Editors, we worry that it may seem like a passive document, to be grazed on lightly, barely digested. The popcorn of the printed word. We would rather it were something substantial, to be chewed over, ruminated, and which either nourishes or prompts dyspeptic emails to authors and editors. Please get in touch to let us know, and heed the call from this issue’s authors to request preprints, to email with suggestions, and to get involved in calls to arms. We look forward to hearing from you. Miguel Moyers and Phil Wilson 3 PRESIDENT’S COLUMN PRESIDENT’S COLUMN The column for this issue will be the President’s Report for 2017. President’s Report, 2017 New Zealand Mathematical Society This year’s New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium was at the University of Auckland. I thank the organisers, especially the co-convenors Tom ter Elst and Hinke Osinga, for all the work involved with this. Membership The current membership is 260, up from last year’s 253. We have 63 student members. We welcome several new members this year. Please encourage new colleagues and students to join our Society. The first year of membership is free. Lecture Tours The 2017 Maclaurin Lecturer was Ken Ono from Emory University. His public lectures “Gems of Ramanujan and their Lasting Impact on Mathematics” and colloquium talk “Jensen polynomials for Riemann’s Xi-function and suitable arithmetic sequences” were very well received. I am grateful to Shaun Cooper for coordinating Ken’s tour. Felipe Voloch’s report on the tour is on page 28. Unfortunately, Ken was the last Maclaurin Lecturer. The Maclaurin Lectureship has been a reciprocal exchange between the New Zealand and the American Mathematical Societies, and the agreement expires at the end of 2017. While the AMS viewed the exchange as a success, they did not want to extend the agreement. Instead, the AMS expressed interest in a second joint AMS–NZMS conference and we are currently in correspondence with them about that. We also have the Forder and Aitken Lecture Tours which are reciprocal two-yearly exchanges between the London Mathematical Society and the NZMS. The current NZMS–LMS agreement is for one more Forder Lecture Tour in 2018 and one more Aitken Lecture Tour in 2019. Valerie Isham, from University College London, is the 2018 Forder Lecturer; she will tour NZ universities in April. I am grateful to Mick Roberts for coordinating Valerie’s tour. The Forder Lectureship is of great value to the New Zealand mathematics community and has historical signif- icance. All the past Forder Lecturers have been research mathematicians of international acclaim who have spoken effectively at the research level, as well as at the more popular level of a public lecture. The feedback from math- ematical departments has been very positive: there is general agreement that the Forder Tours are very beneficial to our community. We have written to the LMS expressing our wish to continue both Lectureships beyond 2019. More Funding from the Kalman Trust for Students The Margaret and John Kalman Charitable Trust has committed to support our Student Travel Grant Scheme by $5000 per annum in 2017–2019. This support will be reviewed in 2019, and will hopefully be continued. I thank Vivien Kirk for negotiating this support with the Trust. December 2016 to August 2017: Student Travel Grants and Other Funding We awarded student travel grants to Jurij Volcic, Cris Hasan, Valerie Chopovda (Gloria Olive Award 2016), Anggha Nugraha, James Hannam, John Moala (Gloria Olive Award 2017), Jose Mujica, Barak Shani, S. Vahid Amirinezhad, Vee-Liem Saw, Yan Bo Ti. We supported several conferences: MINZ 2017, NZMASP 2017, ANZAMP 2018 and the Mirzakhani Hui: Women in Mathematical Sciences Conference (Lower North Island). We also put aside funding for 5 students from outside the Auckland area to attend the Conformal and Symplectic Geometry Conference. We supported the national Maths Craft Festival. While the NZMS does not fund postdocs to travel in general, this year we contributed towards additional costs arising from a postdoc’s family responsibilities during their travel. 4 NZMS Newsletter No. 131 NZMS Awards I thank the members of the Judging Panels for their work in judging the applications and nominations we received. Aitken Prize The Aitken Prize is for the best contributed talk by a student at the Colloquium. The Prize was awarded to Jesse Hart (University of Auckland) for the talk Notions of transfinite diameter on affine algebraic varieties. Left: Jesse Hart receiving the Aitken Prize from Astrid. Right: Valerie Chopovda, Christian Offen, and Jesse Hart. (Photos by Chris Tuffley.) There were three honourable mentions: Valerie Chopovda (Massey University) for the talk Families of pla- nar periodic orbits generated from the Schubart-likeorbit in the Caledonian four-body problem, Christian Offen (Massey University) for the talk Bifurcation of solutions to Hamiltonian boundary value problems and John Grif- fith Moala (University of Auckland) for the talk How do students justify the optimality of their solutions in a contextualized discrete optimization task? Early-Career Research Award The Early-Career Research Award was awarded to Brendan Creutz (University of Canterbury) “For his outstanding work on local-global questions on diophantine equations, in particular his resolution of a 50 year old question of Cassels and the development of novel computational techniques to study the arithmetic of algebraic curves and surfaces.” Brendan Creutz receiving the Early-Career Research Award from Astrid. (Photo by Chris Tuffley.)
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