Tag Archive for: AustMS2021

This is the eighth in a series of interviews with the plenary speakers for the upcoming 65th Annual Meeting of the AustMS.

1. What is your earliest mathematical memory?

 It’s hard to be sure, but I do remember being pleasantly surprised to learn that 1 + 2 + … + n = n(n+1)/2 – I don’t recall if I worked it out for myself or not. When a young boy (aged about 6) I used to amuse myself on long car trips by doing mental arithmetic, but maybe that doesn’t count as “mathematics”.

2. What made you decide to become a mathematician, and when?

When I went to Uni (Monash, 1964-67) as an undergraduate I was undecided between maths, physics and chemistry, but I found that chemistry was too “ad hoc” and physics too “experimental” for me. Also, Monash had a great maths (and stats) department in those days – people like Gordon Preston, Zvonimir Janko, E. Strzelecki, Terry Speed, etc. So perhaps I decided to become a mathematician around 1966, in my third year at Monash. As a graduate student at Stanford (1968-71), I took courses from some great mathematicians (George Polya (in his eighties), Menahem (Max) Schiffer) but ended up graduating in Computer Science (which also had mathematicians: Forsythe, Golub, Knuth, etc). I then worked at the mathematical end of computer science for many years, and did not get a “real” job as a mathematician until the age of 58, when I became a Federation Fellow in MSI at ANU.

3. Name a favourite paper by a contemporary mathematician, and why (or more than one, if you can’t decide).

• Brad Rogers and Terence Tao, “The de Bruijn-Newman constant is non-negative”, Forum of Mathematics, Pi. 8, 2020, e6. https://doi.org/10.1017/fmp.2020.6, arXiv:1801.05914

This paper improved on several earlier papers, and any further improvement would require proving (or disproving) the RiemannHypothesis. (Several other papers by Terry Tao are also amongst my “favourites”.)

4. What historical mathematician would you like to be able to talk maths with? What would you ask them?

Bernhard Riemann. I would ask him what he knew (or believed to be true) about the Riemann zeta function, but had not published.

5. What result would you like to see in mathematics in the next 10 years?

A proof that P ne NP, or that the Riemann Hypothesis is true, or that the optimal exponent in the complexity of matrix multiplication is strictly greater than two, or […]. One attraction of mathematics is that there is never a shortage of interesting open problems!

This is the sixth in a series of interviews with the plenary speakers for the upcoming 65th Annual Meeting of the AustMS.

1. What is your earliest mathematical memory?

I was listening to my parents talk about something and I interrupted them to ask my dad what a 15% discount meant. I remember his explanation of “one-tenth and then half that again” being really easy to follow. My dad says I then worked out what their discount was going to be (on my brother’s braces); but I don’t remember that I just remember his explanation of how to calculate 15%.  

2. What made you decide to become a mathematician, and when?

I decided to become a mathematician in my first year of university. I was studying maths and economics in a double degree at the time; business because my parents were worried that I’d have no career options after finishing a maths degree on its own. I didn’t enjoy the economics much but loved studying maths at university and from then there wasn’t another career on my radar. 

3. Name a favourite paper by a contemporary mathematician, and why (or more than one, if you can’t decide).

• Jonathan Sherratt and James Murray, “Models of epidermal wound healing”, Proc Biol Sci. 1990 Jul 23;241(1300):29-36. doi: 10.1098/rspb.1990.0061. PMID: 1978332.

This paper started my love of mathematical biology and was the first that I spent many months looking over as part of a research project in my undergraduate degree. I wish I had time to look over papers now like I did this one.  

4. What historical mathematician would you like to be able to talk maths with? What would you ask them?

I don’t think I could go past having a chat with Alan Turing about his mathematical work of how biological shapes and patterns develop.  I’d probably have a few questions about cracking the Enigma code too 🙂   

5. What result would you like to see in mathematics in the next 10 years?

Since what I work on is quite applied, this is difficult for me to answer in the way I’m assuming the question was intended. So, I’m going to take this question a bit differently and say that the ‘result’ I’d like to see is more structure/support around interdisciplinary work that involves mathematics and statistics.  

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with the plenary speakers for the upcoming 65th Annual Meeting of the AustMS.

1. What is your earliest mathematical memory?

Not the earliest memory but an early memory is being absolutely delighted by Louis Sachar’s Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School. Problems include EGG + EGG = PAGE, SHE+EEL = ELSE, etc.

2. What made you decide to become a mathematician, and when?

I’ve loved math my entire life and had decided to become a mathematician by mid high school, when I started learning about proofs.

3. Name a favourite paper by a contemporary mathematician, and why (or more than one, if you can’t decide).

John Bourke’s and Richard Garner’s “Algebraic weak factorisation systems I: accessible AWFS” is absolutely beautiful and on a topic very close to my heart. 

Though I also have to mention the delightful “Homophonic quotients of free groups” by Jean-Francois Mestre, René School, Lawrence Washington, and Don Zagier, which everyone should read immediately.

4. What historical mathematician would you like to be able to talk maths with? What would you ask them?

I’d love to hear Emmy Noether describe the insights that lead her to modern algebra.

5. What result would you like to see in mathematics in the next 10 years?

I’d like to see a variant of homotopy type theory which actually computes, includes higher inductive types, and has semantics in any ∞-topos. Mike Shulman has proven that traditional homotopy type theory (without higher inductive types) has semantics in any ∞-topoi, but we’re still working on understanding the semantics of the new experimental “cubical” versions of homotopy type theory which have constructive proofs of univalence.

This is the second in a series of interviews with the plenary speakers for the upcoming 65th Annual Meeting of the AustMS.

1. What is your earliest mathematical memory?

My earliest mathematical memories come from my years at primary school. Things that stand out are the colourful Cuisenaire rods, which all the kids enjoyed. Then there was the rote learning of the times tables up to 12 x12 which was fun as a group chanting activity, like singing songs. I clearly recall our initiation to long division, which was generally hated, although I didn’t mind it in moderation. Lastly, I recall that we had to do written calculations in non-base 10 units, for length, area, volume, speed, currency, etc. That was later removed from the primary school curriculum but, looking back, it is perhaps surprising that most students were able to manage it quite well.

2. What made you decide to become a mathematician, and when?

At primary school I was very interested by mathematics and science, and I seemed to have an aptitude for it, but at that time, where I grew up, no child would have imagined they were going to become a mathematician. I was absolutely enthralled by watching the first lunar landing, which really sparked my interest in gravity. So I just naturally drifted towards focussing on mathematics and physics and, by the time I was 14, I had decided that I somehow wanted my career to involve those fields.

3. Name a favourite paper by a contemporary mathematician, and why (or more than one, if you can’t decide).

• Penrose, R., 1965, “Gravitational collapse and space-time singularities”, Physical Review Letters, vol. 14, no. 3. pp. 57–59, 1965.

The contemporary mathematical physicist Prof Sir Roger Penrose proved an astonishing singularity theorem in 1965. He showed that, in very general circumstances involving isolated gravitating systems undergoing gravitational collapse, a trapped surface will form, inevitably leading to the formation of a singularity – the heart of a black hole. This result demonstrated that singularities in black holes should be a common feature of our Universe, and yet no candidate for a black hole had been identified at that time. The international astronomy community were in denial about the result, and even Einstein himself would have been shocked to see this consequence of his theory. This incredible breakthrough earned Roger the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

4. What historical mathematician would you like to be able to talk maths with? What would you ask them?

I would love to be able to chat with Emmy Noether. She was an extraordinarily gifted mathematician and mathematical physicist with great vision of connections between different branches of mathematics. I would ask her how she became interested in exploring the mathematics behind the then recently presented general theory of relativity due to Einstein. I would also ask how the insight she gained with this work led her eventually to the creation of the deep principle known as Noether’s Theorem, one of the most celebrated results in mathematical physics.

5. What result would you like to see in mathematics in the next 10 years?

The famous singularity theorem due to Roger Penrose actually proves that, in very general circumstances involving isolated gravitating systems undergoing gravitational collapse, a trapped surface will form and thus there will exist an incomplete, causal geodesic. The theorem does not actually prove the existence of curvature singularities as the name suggests. The “completion” of this singularity theorem to prove the existence of curvature singularities has proven to be an intractable problem for more than 50 years. I would love to see that problem cracked in the next 10 years, and I would love to be part of the solution!