More promotion success this year, with long-time members Jeff Hogan and Michael Coons being promoted to associate professor. Congratulations!

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.

Associate Professor Mike Meylan has just been awarded a Visiting Fellowship at Clare Hall of Cambridge University. Meylan is one of 40 leading scholars chosen from many disciplines for the prestigious fellowship over the 2017-2018 academic year. In addition, Visiting Fellows become Life Members of Clare Hall and are welcomed back at any time to participate in college life. Meylan will be studying the vibration of ice shelves, working with Prof. I. David Abrahams, current director of the Isaac Newton Institute and one of the leading figures in applied mathematics in the United Kingdom.

"Most of the Visiting Fellows come from other countries, which makes the community here very culturally rich. It is a wonderful opportunity to experience the academic and cultural life of this amazing university."

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 Assis is featured in an article entitled The Atomic Theory of Origami in the online magazine Quanta.

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 IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Foundation was created to foster the scientific and social goals of innovative control engineering activities. The inaugural IFAC Foundation Award recognises a contribution which shows how automatic control science and technology can contribute to significant advances in the broad area of sustainable development. The award-winning paper “Impact of climate model parametric uncertainty in an MPC implementation of the DICE integrated assessment model” shows how control engineering techniques can be applied to robustly estimate the so-called ‘social cost of carbon dioxide’. The award was presented at the Closing Ceremony of the 2017 IFAC World Congress in Toulouse, France on 14 July 2017.

CARMA director and world-renowned mathematician Professor George Willis has received a $2.8 million ARC Laureate Fellowship to support his research, aimed at developing the algebraic theory of zero-dimensional symmetry. While being important pure mathematics research, this also has application in the field of computer science with relevance to data structures, potentially optimising computer performance.

Congratulations George!

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).

Laureate Professor Jon Borwein, director and founder of the CARMA Research Centre, passed away unexpectedly on Tuesday, 2nd August, 2017. Jon was a towering figure in mathematics, supervising numerous students and post-doctoral fellows, organising workshops and conferences, and acting as a mentor and collaborator across the globe. His academic output was staggering, publishing over 500 scientific papers and twenty-eight books. Since arriving in Australia, his impact on mathematical research both here at the University of Newcastle and across the country cannot be overstated.

The following links show the esteem Jon was held in and expand upon the story of his life.

• Experimental Math
• Anthony Bonato
• Canadian Maths Society
• UoN

While CARMA will continue the legacy which Jon built, we know that Jon is truly irreplaceable both as a mathematician and as a person. A memorial service celebrating his remarkable life and achievements was held on Wednesday, 21st September, 2017.

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.

Dear Colleagues: I am sorry to have to tell you that our friend and colleague Mirka Miller passed away at 10am on Saturday 02/01/2016 after a short illness. The funeral service is on Wednesday (06/01) at 3pm. The Funeral Chapel is located at 209 Maitland Road Mayfield (off-road parking is available across the road). Following the service there will be a get-together at Customs House. In lieu of flowers it is suggested that people consider making a donation to the GI Cancer Institute (gicancer.org.au). More details will be available in Tuesday's Newcastle or Sydney Morning Herald.

CARMA has been renewed as a University of Newcastle Priority Research Centre through 2020. Read our presentation here.
Well done by all of you.

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

Congratulations to Cameron who tonight was awarded the Victorian Algebra Conference Honourable Mention for his talk "Using random walk distributions for determining Følner sequences".

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 at http://www.austms.org.au/Jobs/Scholarship193.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.

Congratulations to CARMA Members Murray Elder, Jeff Hogan, Chris Kellett and Mirka Miller, who along with CARMA director Borwein were successful in the just announced competition.

CARMA Ph.D. student Matt Tam was a winner of the 2015 Bernhard Neumann Prize. This prestigious prize is given for the best student talk at the annual meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, and was awarded on Wednesday 30 September. There were 48 talks in the competition. In 2011 the award was won by then CARMA student Dr James Wan and in 2013 Tam himself received an honourable mention as did Cameron Rogers in 2014.

AMSI has a new quarterly maths newsletter which you can view at schools.amsi.org.au/news/, and you can also subscribe to an e-mail version.

The September edition includes stories on the Choose Maths programme, "National Mathematics Career Awareness", the "Inspiring Women in Mathematics Network" and more.

Recently Mike Meylan spoke to 2NURFM about his research in wave power. Listen here.

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.

The National Secondary Schools Poster Competition (www.ssaipostercomp.info) involves teams of secondary school students creating, designing, implementing and creatively reporting upon a data-based investigation in any field (producing a "conference-poster"). National Winners are forwarded to the the International Statistical Literacy Project (ISLP)competition. The National Junior Division Winners from the 2014 Australian competition (Lisarow High School, Central Coast) were last week announced at the International Statistical Institute’s 60th World Statistics Congress as the Winners of the International Statistical Literacy Project – Junior Division. They receive 450 Euros and a Certificate. There were more than 20 countries competing; click here for winners and their posters.

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.

Work by CARMA's financial mathematics group (MAFFIA) led by Dave Bailey and Jon Borwein, occupies three of the top ten places in the Econometrics: Mathematical Methods and Programming list of most down loaded papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) website.

Videos of the four Mathematical Logic and Philosophy lectures, given here recently by Prof Jeremy Avigad, are now available on the CARMA website. For future reference, they are linked by our Online Resources page.

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.

The Scientific Committee of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation (HLFF) has selected Matt to participate in the 3rd Heidelberg Laureate Forum, taking place from August 23 to 28 in Heidelberg, Germany. Only the 200 most qualified young Researchers in mathematics and computer science are granted the opportunity to experience the unique atmosphere of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.

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!

Jonathan Borwein CARMA director, was among roughly 60 new Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS): he was cited "For contributions to nonsmooth analysis and classical analysis as well as experimental mathematics and visualization of mathematics."

See the AMS Fellows pages for: Full details.

The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) is pleased to announce the co-recipients of the 2014 G. de B. Robinson Award. Jonathan M. Borwein (Newcastle, NSW), Armin Straub (Illinois), James Wan (Newcastle, NSW), and Wadim Zudilin (Newcastle, NSW) are being honoured for their paper “Densities of Short Uniform Random Walks” (with an appendix by Don Zagier), Canadian Journal of Mathematics (CJM), 64:5 2012, pp. 961-990. At the same time, J. Nekovář (Université Pierre et Marie Curie) for his paper “Level Raising and Anticyclotomic Selmer Groups for Hilbert Modular Forms of Weight Two" CJM, 64:3 2012, pp. 588-649. "These are wonderful and engaging research papers” said Karl Dilcher, Chair, CMS Publications Committee “They reflect a quality and discipline well-deserving of honour for the contribution they make to mathematical sciences research.” “This is a wonderful article that is written in an engaging style and brings a heroic project to a triumphant conclusion,” noted Robert McCann, Editor-in-Chief.

Macquarie University has awarded the Moyal Medal for 2014 to Professor Richard Brent. See the medallists page for a list of previous winners and the 2014 Moyal Lecture page for details about the lecture. The slides from the talk can be obtained from Richard's talks page.

CARMA welcomes Dr Ohad Giladi (Functional Analysis) and Dr Paul Vrbik (Computer Algebra) who have recently taken two year Research Associate posts.

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).

http://vrs.amsi.org.au/about/ Get funding to complete a six-week summer research project under the guidance of a (CARMA) supervisor! Scholarships: Australia wide $450/week for six-weeks Present at the "Big Day In" Fully funded travel & accommodation Open to (3rd year students) intending honours and masters students Applications close 8 September

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

Fran Aragon, former CARMA postdoc and current member, has won a "Ramón y Cajal" fellowship. This is a highly-competitive Spanish tenure-track postdoctoral grant scheme, for individuals who got a PhD within the last 10 years (similar to the Future Fellowship scheme in Oz). It entails a 5-year contract with a tenure-track commitment, with freedom of area of research. He will return to Alicante in October to take up his fellowship. There were 175 awarded in all subjects and only 5 were awarded in mathematics.
Congratulations Fran!

The article "Storm-induced sea-ice breakup and the implications for ice extent" by AL Kohout,MJM Williams, SM Dean and MH Meylan was published online today. The authors show that the propagation of large waves through sea-ice around Antarctica extends much further than previously thought, and demonstrate the relationship between the location of the sea-ice edge and wave height over more than a decade.
Congratulations on a fine paper!

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)

CARMA Deputy Director George Willis is one of 20 new Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science -- announced a few minutes ago, see the FAA website.

The FAA is the highest Australian scientific honour one can attain. There are now roughly 475 members over all scientific fields and less than 25 mathematicians of whom three are now CARMA members. See list.

This election is a fitting acknowledgement of the sustained depth of George's contributions to mathematics. George's citation reads:

Professor George Willis FAA School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of Newcastle Elected for his innovation in diverse fields of mathematics, including insights into locally compact groups and fundamental concepts such as the scale function and flatness.

Jonathan Borwein, CARMA Director

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/

We are very pleased that Ali has accepted a Lectureship in Statistics. He brings a wide variety of skills in statistics, optimisation and discrete mathematics.

Well done to CARMA applied mathematician Bishnu Lamichhane who has been promotes to Senior Lecturer in mathematics.

Congratulations to CARMA members who were awarded ARC Discovery Project Grants commencing in 2014 and managed at Newcastle or elsewhere. They include: Wadim Zudilin, Richard Brent, Andrew Eberhard, and Jonathan Borwein. Special congratulations to Michael Coons who received a DECRA (Distinguished Early Research Career Award). This year the national success rate for Discovery Projects was under 20%.

Congratulations to Michael Coons on his successful ARC DECRA application, and to Jon Borwein, Richard Brent and David Bailey on their ARC Discovery Project grant.

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.

CARMA has produced a document outlining our standing in the world of mathematics, current areas of research and a view to the future, "CARMA Present and Future".

CARMA Ph.D. student Matt Tam was one of five honourable mentions for the 2013 Bernhard Neumann Prize. This prestigious prize is given for the best student talk at the annual meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, and was awarded on Wednesday 2nd October. There were a record 76 talks in the competition. In 2011 the award was won by former CARMA student Dr James Wan.

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/

A large team from the schools of Mathematics and Education have been part of a successful maths-focused bid for "Enhancing the Training of Maths and Science Teachers".

This is a joint grant with UoW, UTas, JCU, USyd and UQ (as lead). They have been awarded $2.2 million over 3 years to improve maths teaching at the school level.

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.

Newcastle was one of only four Mathematics units in Australasia to be ranked in the top 200 by the 2013 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) released on August 16 by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Details are available: here.

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

The University of Newcastle is currently seeking applications from high calibre, motivated, international PhD candidates. Applications close on 31st August. Click here for details.

Experimental mathematics is a raison d'être for CARMA; our new page outlines a variety of current projects.

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

We are delighted to announce that as of July 1, 2013, CARMA member Wadim Zudilin will be promoted to the rank of Professor. This a highly deserved tribute to Wadim Zudilin and especially to his remarkable talents as a researcher.

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.

An Indonesian blog proclaims the "10 Best Mathematicians in Indonesia". Four of them are former PhD students of our own Mirka Miller! Read the article here. Mirka's students are numbers 1, 4, 5 and 6 on the list.

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/.

The MPE Australia conference will be held in Melbourne from 8-12 July, and abstract submissions are now open. Please visit www.MoPE.org.au/events/2013 for more information.

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.

2013 is the International Year of Maths of Planet Earth, and Australia is partnering with 140 countries to celebrate our discipline’s contribution to the world (www.MoPE.org.au). Prof. Ian Chubb is patron of the year in Australia and many eminent scientists and public figures are MPE Ambassadors. This conference, sponsored by the Academy of Science, is the central scientific event of MPE Australia 2013. See the programme at mathsofplanetearth.org.au/mpe_program/. Abstract submissions are now open, and close at 5 pm on Friday, 31st May, 2013. Full details are available at www.MoPE.org.au/events/2013.

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.

The Australian Research Council has released the 2012 Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) outcomes. Applied Mathematics at the University of Newcastle has again received a 5 rating (this time, along with CQU). Read more on the ARC website.

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

The University of Newcastle is to be a full member of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute from next year:

"Dear members,
 "on behalf of the AMSI Joint Venture Partners (Full Members), the AMSI Board and management I am very pleased to announce that the University of Newcastle will become a Full Member of AMSI in 2013. As you all know Newcastle has a particularly vibrant mathematical sciences discipline which has been a significant contributor to AMSI. Their membership upgrade is enthusiastically welcomed by the full members and it broadens the base of AMSI’s representation in New South Wales.
  "Professor Geoff Prince, Director of AMSI."

Jon Borwein and Fran Aragón are one of the ten finalists in a visualisation contest organised by the National Science Fundation, with the 100 billion-step walk picture of \(\pi\). The winners will appear on Science! There is a people choice award. You may support us and vote for our picture in http://goo.gl/UEwFE.

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.

A concert to be held at the University of Newcastle's Conservatorium, Thursday 25th October: "A performance event inspired by the rich intersections between mathematics, music and sound including Rameau's 1722 Treatise on Harmony, the melodic fugal number games of Bach, Froberger and Frescobaldi, the crystalline serial structures of Webern, spectral transformations of acoustic cello, and Fran Aragon and Jon Borwein's 100 billion-step walk through the digits of $\pi$." Full details are on the flyer. See also Culture Hunter.

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.

CARMA is delighted to announce that Dr Judy-anne Osborn, currently a CARMA research associate, has accepted a continuing appointment as a Lecturer in mathematics at the University of Newcastle. In addition to continuing her research in combinatorics and related fields, Judy-anne's new position has special responsibilities for developing innovative teaching techniques.

AMSI, in partnership with the AustMS, ANZIAM, SSAI, ANZAMP and ASOR, has announced a new seminar series featuring eminent experts. It will be held over the Access Grid. More information (and, later, seminar announcements) is available on the series home page. We will also add these to the CARMA events schedule as they arise.

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

We will be running a weekly seminar on Optimisation, Analysis and Number Theory. Time and venue: 3pm on Mondays at V205. The speakers will be announced through the CARMA website, as usual. The list of upcoming speakers is also available at http://goo.gl/1GFfr. If you're interested in contributing with a talk, please contact Fran Aragon.

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 2012 CARMA retreat was held at Fort Scratchley in Newcastle on Saturday, 18th August, and was both well-attended and well-received by members. Prizes for the best student poster were hotly contested, with victory going to Reena Kapoor and Simran Kaur for their poster "Scheduling unit processing time arc shutdown jobs to maximize network flow over time: complexity results".
The final programme with links to most presentations can be found here or via the Past Events page.

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.

Fran Aragon has created a new, 108-gigapixel, walk using the digits of $\pi$, this time with 100,000,000,000 steps. See it in its full glory on the GigaPan website or browse smaller versions of all the walks here. This is probably the largest mathematical image ever produced.

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.

CARMA is pleased to welcome our new member of staff, Dr Michael Coons.

Michael completed his BA in Mathematics at The University of Montana, Missoula, and his BS in Mathematics at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In 2005, Michael won a Fulbright Fellowship to study number theory at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Michael obtained his PhD from Simon Fraser University in 2009, writing a thesis titled "Parity, transcendence, and multiplicative functions." Prior to becoming a Lecturer at Newcastle, he held a Fields-Ontario Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Fields Institute and the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Michael's research interests lie in number theory as broadly defined though he can usually be found working in arithmetic functions, transcendental number theory, or Diophantine approximation (specifically in the context of Mahler's method).

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.

Congratulations to Jon Borwein (very much alive), who appears in the top 100 cited mathematicians (dead or alive). Full list here.

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.

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

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

Starting in early March, Jon Borwein will give a reading course out of his 2010 Cambridge University Press book Convex Functions, co-authored with Jon Vanderwerff. Please let him know if you are interested in participating. Details of the book are at Contents.

This year (2012) is the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing. Here is a song about him, written by Steve Pride, a mathematician in Glasgow.

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).

"In case you weren't aware, your book "Convex Functions" was selected as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011 by "Choice", the American Library Association academic library book review journal. http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/currentissue#oat.

Congratulations again! This should be a prestige and sales boost for the book. Kitty (Research Librarian La Sierra)"

Science & Technology
Mathematics Borwein, Jonathan M. Convex functions: constructions, characterizations and counterexamples", by Jonathan M. Borwein and Jon D. Vanderwerff. Cambridge, 2010. 521p bibl index (Encyclopedia of mathematics and its applications, 109); ISBN 9780521850056, $130.00. Outstanding Title!
Reviewed in 2011jun CHOICE.

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.

See the articles It all adds up and Delving into the unknown in http://www.newcastle.edu.au/Resources/Divisions/Research/Research%20Showcase/Research-2011.pdf.

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.

Featuring Borwein, De Sautoy, Devlin and Singh from June 2011.

Borwein and Bailey are now regular contributors to The Conversation on Mathematics, Science and Society. Suggestions for topics are welcome.

Borwein-Eberhardt-Sims and Willis-Elder brought in almost $750,000 in new Discovery Project research funding.

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.