DEPARTMENT
NEWS
STATISTICS
DIVISION
by Dr. David Hamilton
The
Statistics Division has had an interesting and productive year.
With a relatively small number of faculty, it continues to offer
a full range of academic programs, undergraduate and graduate.
Due to success in obtaining funding from outside sources (Atlantic
Genome Project, Canada Research Chairs) the Division has been
able to increase its graduate enrolment significantly. The demand
for Statistics graduates remains high, and our former students
have achieved great success in academia, government, business
and industry. We are particularly proud of Michael Newton, a
former undergraduate student and faculty member at the University
of Wisconsin, who was recently awarded the international COPSS
Award in recognition of his remarkable achievements in statistical
research before the age of forty. Our faculty remains active
publishing their research, and attending and organizing scientific
meetings. Research groups have evolved in the areas of Statistical
Genetics (genomics, quantitative traits and genetic epidemiology)
and in Environmental Statistics. We look forward to welcoming
new faculty member Joanna Mills-Flemming this summer, and at
the same time, we wish Chris Field well in his retirement.
MATHEMATICS
DIVISION
by Dr. Dorette Pronk
Our
division of mathematics has seen a lot of exciting developments
this year in our connections with math departments and researchers
at other universities as well as with people in our local community.
These connections provide both a stimulating study environment
and interesting opportunities for our undergraduate and graduate
students, as well as our faculty members.
High
School Level Outreach
Aside from the well-attended Nova Scotia math league and Math
Circles program our department has been involved in the Dalhousie
Open House (in October 2004), the CMS summer camp, and the math
camp for black students. Dorette Pronk will also be serving
as deputy leader on the Canadian team for the International
Math Olympiad and Paul Ottaway will be participating as one
of the team's coaches. The team's training will be at the Banff
International Research Station and the Olympiad will be held
in Merida, Mexico this year.
Accomplishments
of our Students
We also want to take this opportunity to celebrate the achievements
of our current and past students. Kathryn Duffy, who graduated
from Dalhousie in May 2004 with a joint honours degree in mathematics
and computer science, is continuing her graduate studies in
computer science at Queen's with an NSERC CGS doctoral scholarship
of $35,000 per year. John Klapstein was also accepted into the
doctoral program in mathematics at Queen's. We also congratulate
our honours student, Christy Cameron, who received an NSERC
awards to attend grad school this fall. Two other honours students,
Rachael Manion and Sable McKeil spent their fall semester in
Mexico and returned in January with an increased knowledge of
Spanish and new energy to dive into mathematics and be involved
in the life of our department. Sarah Young, another math honours
student, wrote the LSAT examination and placed in the very top
category of students writing this exam. We wish her the best
for her studies and career in law. Micah McCurdy is the recipient
of an NSERC summer research fellowship and will be studying
category theory with Bob Paré. He will also spend a couple of
weeks in Belgium at a summer school to study topos theory with
leaders in this field such as Peter Johnstone and Ieke Moerdijk.
Tara Taylor, one of our PhD-students, is defending her thesis
this month and has received a tenure track position at Saint
Francis Xavier University. We congratulate Tara on these a chievements
and wish her the very best for her continued career in mathematical
research and teaching.
Visitors
We have had the privilege of hosting and collaborating with
several long-term visitors, both from other Canadian and international
institutions. Edgar Goodaire (from Memorial University in St.
John's, NL) and Orin Chein (from Temple University in Philadelphia)
spent their sabbatical leaves here at Dalhousie to work together.
Mark Chamberland from the Department of Mathematics and Computer
Science at Grinnell College, has spent the past year with us
working on joint projects with Karl Dilcher and Jon Borwein.
Drs. Lee and Kim (from China) have visited us to work with K.
K. Tan. Mark Fels (Utah State University) spent several months
with us in the fall of 2004, and assisted Rob Milson in organizing
a special session at the CMS 2004 summer conference. As a follow-up
to this session, Alan Coley, Rob Milson, and Mark Fels organized
an AARMS workshop on symbolic computation.
Conferences
June 13 – 15, 2004, our department hosted the joint meeting
of the Canadian Mathematical Society and the Canadian Applied
and Industrial Mathematics Society. We thank our local organizers
Richard Wood (CMS) and Ray Spiteri (CAIMS) for a very successful
meeting with more than 600 registered participants, many of
whom were graduate students. The poster sessions both before
and during the meeting were well-attended and gave graduate
students a wonderful opportunity to present their work. Many
of our faculty either organized sessions or presented papers
at this meeting. The undergraduate students also took advantage
of this joint meeting. The Dalhousie math undergraduate student
society MASS hosted the Canadian Undergraduate Mathematics Conference
right after the joint meeting of the CMS and CAIMS, and invited
some of their speakers. They had a very successful meeting with
many well-attended and well-presented sessions. We thank Gilman
Payette for his work as local organizer.
Seminars
Aside from the colloquium, we have had regular meetings of the
following seminars this year: the algebra and category theory
seminar, the graph theory seminar, and the general relativity
seminar. All of these seminars have been well attended by both
faculty and students.
Postdoctoral
Fellowships
This past year we have had the exceptional privilege of hosting
two Killam postdoctoral fellows, Sigbjørn Hervik and
Gabor Lukacs, in general relativity and algebra respectively.
They will both stay with us for another year, as will Eva Curry
(in analytic number theory) and Nicos Pelavas (in general relativity).
This coming year they will be joined by two new postdocs in
algebra and category theory, Kia Dalili (with an AARMS fellowship)
and Jeff Egger. We recognize their valuable contributions to
both the teaching and research of this department.
Conferences
The research contributions of our department members are also
recognized by other institutions as is apparent from the list
of conferences where our faculty members have been invited to
speak or have served as organizers.
David Iron gave a talk at the SIAM Conference on Analysis of
Partial Differential Equations and will be giving a talk at
the CAIMS 2005 meeting in June.
Richard
Nowakowski gave an invited lecture at the East Coast Combinatorics
Conference, January 2005.
Ray
McLenaghan (Waterloo) and Roman Smirnov (Dalhousie) are organizing
a session entitled “Invariant Theory and Differential
Geometry” at the CMS/CSHPM Summer 2005 Meeting to be held
June 4-6, 2005 at the University of Waterloo.
Jon
Borwein has given about 35 invited lectures and presentations
on various topics related to mathematics, education, and computation,
in a great variety of venues over the past year.
Organizer: R. Nowakowski, Games-At-Dal 3 Workshop. 12 participants
from Canada, France, New Zealand and USA. June 2004
Organizers:
J. Janssen, R. Nowakowski, CMS Special Session on a: Scale Free
networks; b: Games. June 2004
Organizer:
R. Nowakowski, Banff International Research Station, Combinatorial
Game Theory Workshop, June 2005.
Organizer:
P. Keast, The Sixth Annual Numerical Analysis Day, to be held
at Cape Breton University on June 10, 2005.
