298 The 48th annual meeting of the Australian Mathematical So- ciety

The 48th annual meeting of the Australian and Mathematics at the University of Mel- Mathematical Society took place at RMIT bourne between 1935 and 1945. in Melbourne from September 28 till Octo- Of course, as with all good conferences, ber 1. With a record number of 50 students organisers and participants alike were held attending (34 of whom presented talks), and in suspense over whether some of the more close to 20 oversees participants taking part emminent guests would actually make their from a healthy total of 199 attendees, the appearance. Due to fog at Melbourne meeting organised by Kathy Horadam, An- Airport on the first day of the meeting, drew Eberhard, Asha Rao was a great suc- ’ flight took a U turn back cess. As a first for the annual meeting, to Adelaide. George consequently missed the organising committee was assisted by a the opening session and the presentation of team of professional conference organisers. the Szekeres medal. Fortunately, improved A strong drawcard of the organisers was weather conditions in the afternoon allowed the exciting list of plenary speakers, includ- him to belatedly congratulate Bob Ander- ing the 2002 Fields medalist Vladimir Vo- son and to taste the special 2000 vintage evodsky and the mountaineer, entertainer GSM wine. Vladimir Voevodsky also lived and integer sequence guru Neil Sloane. The up to his reputation by not turning up for full list of plenary speakers was made up of his plenary lecture on the Wednesday morn- ing, his spot being filled by Ralph Stan- • Rosemary Bailey (QMC) – Association ton. Fortunately Voevodsky did make a sur- schemes and their products prise appearance on the very last day (he • Alberto Bressan (SISSA) – Hyperbolic alledgedly showed up the night before at a systems of conservation laws Melbourne hotel, without proper clothes) to • Louis Caccetta (Curtin) – Industrial deliver his lecture. modelling and optimisation • Danny Calegari (Caltech) – Shrinkwrapping, and the taming of hy- perbolic 3-manifolds • Boris Mordukhovich (Wayne State) – Optimal control of evolution and par- tial differential inclusions • Neil Sloane (AT&T) – The on-line en- cyclopedia of integer sequences • Vladimir Voevodsky (Princeton) – A categorical approach to probability the- ory

Kathy Horadam, Andrew Eberhard and Special evening lectures on the Aus- Asha Rao. tralian history of Mathematics were in the knowledgable hands of Graeme Cohen, who At the opening ceremony, retiring spoke on Australian mathematical history: AustMS President Tony Guttmann pre- Women in Australian mathematics to 195 0, sented Bob Anderssen from CSIRO with the George Szekeres medal. More on this award, The 48th annual meeting of the AustMS 299 as well as a written version of Bob’s talk doing well. The committee gave special can be found later. This year, the AustMS commendations to Damian Heard from the Medal was not awarded. (who also received a special commendation last year) for his talk “Searching for hyperbolic structures”, and to Geoffrey Pearce of the University of Western Australia for his talk “Transi- tive factorisations of graphs”. The B.H. Neumann prize for the most outstanding talk presented by a student at the 48th annual meeting of the AustMS was how- ever awarded to Jonathan A. Cohen for his talk “Unlocking the structure of large base groups”.

Tony Guttmann and Bob Anderssen

The conference dinner took place at the Melbourne Aquarium, with scenic views of the Yarra river and Southbank – not to men- tion the exquisite aquarium fish. Spirits at the Western Australian table were particu- Damian Heard, Jonathan Cohen and Geof- larly high, with the B. H. Neumann prize for frey Pearce the best student talk awarded to Jonathan Cohen from the University of Western Aus- tralia. The winning mood was undoubtedly Citation report of the Szekeres enhanced by the fact that the UWA can medal also look forward to hosting the 49th annual meeting of the Australian Mathematical So- Bob Anderssen is a very productive ap- ciety, to be held on 26 – 30 September, 2005 plied mathematician who has published in Perth. around 200 research and conference papers, edited a number of conference proceedings, and translated several mathematical mono- B.H. Neumann prize graphs from the Russian. This year, 34 students competed for the Bob did his undergraduate work and B.H. Neumann prize for best student talk. a masters degree in applied and compu- In her presentation of the prize, Jacqui tational mathematics at the University of Rammage, long-standing Chair of the prize Queensland, and a PhD in mathematics at comittee, stressed that the prize seems to be the . He lectured at working. The quality of the talks this year Monash University for a year before moving was very high, and consequently it is becom- in 1968 to a research position in computa- ing increasingly hard to judge. Some of the tional mathematics at the Australian Na- jurors pointed out that there were some po- tional University. Since 1979 he has worked tential employees out there who seemed to on industrial and computational problems be better lecturers than them . . . . What- in the CSIRO Mathematics and Information ever the case may be, the next generation Sciences Division. Bob has supervised 18 re- of Australian mathematicians seems to be search students, many of whom have gone 300 The 48th annual meeting of the AustMS on to make important contributions them- the data, which is usually a less badly posed selves. problem. He has made significant advances The major thrust of Bob’s work has on the regularisation of the maximum likeli- been to understand and solve inverse prob- hood problem, and established the first sta- lems. He was a pioneer in this field and bility results for higher order and higher his early work on the numerical solution of dimensional numerical differentiation. Bob Abel integral equations, numerical differen- has modelled the drying of pasta, and ex- tiation and inverse scattering methods for plained the string vibrations in the unique geophysical problems is still very influen- Australian designed Stuart and Sons piano. tial. Bob’s understanding of the ill-posed His work on the mixing of bread dough and nature of most inverse problems and his on the properties of asphalt has led to fun- deep knowledge of methods for their solu- damental mathematical work on rheology. tion have given him an international repu- Bob was Chair of the Division of Ap- tation. Over the last 15 years Bob’s mathe- plied Mathematics of the Australian Math- matical modelling work has very wide scope. ematical Society from 1982 to 1984, Pres- He has always been based in Australia, ident of the Australian Mathematical So- but has had very many productive collab- ciety (AustMS) from 1984 to 1986, Chair orations with scientists, pure and applied of the National Committee for Mathemat- mathematicians, and statisticians around ics (NCM) from 1985 to 1991 and Hon- the world. orary Treasurer of the Federation of Aus- tralian Scientific and Technological Soci- eties (FASTS) from 1985 to 1994. Through these offices Bob has had a lasting impact on the mathematical sciences in Australia. Bob modernised the AustMS with the for- mation of a Steering Committee, and was responsible for its strong support for the Mathematics Olympiad held in Australia in 1987. In his subsequent post of NCM Chair his promotion of mathematics was ex- tremely persistent and effective. He lobbied successfully for mathematical sciences to be represented in the Australian Research Bob Anderssen and George Szekeres Council, which transformed research fund- In practice it is often some functional of ing for mathematical work. the solution of an inverse problem that is Bob Anderssen is very well qualified for needed, and Bob has developed methods for the award of a George Szekeres medal. calculating such a functional directly from