Invited Speakers

Nalini Joshi (Hanna Neumann lecturer) University of Sydney

Nalini is interested in the mathematical analysis of non-linear systems, in particular, in developing new methods of analysing and deducing the special properties of integrable systems which have astonishingly beautiful behaviours.
Interest in non-linear models has grown dramatically over the last four decades, since, on the one hand, chaos was discovered in simple models of the atmospheric circulation (e.g., in the well-known Lorenz equations), and on the other hand astonishingly well-ordered and predictable behaviour was found in certain models of non-linear lattices used to describe thermal properties of metals (e.g. the FPU lattice and the Korteweg-de Vries equation). The latter observations led to the theory of solitons and completely integrable systems, one of the most profound advances of twentieth century mathematics. Reductions of soliton equations led to the Painlevé equations, which are canonical representations of integrable models in one dimension. Integrable systems have now been recognized as widely applicable models of science, occurring in fluid dynamics, particle physics, solid state physics, optics and many other fields. My research has focussed on methods to describe solutions of such systems.
Nalini Joshi holds a PhD and MA from Princeton University in Applied Mathematics and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Sydney. She has held lecturing positions and fellowships at ANU, UNSW, and the University of Adelaide, as well as visiting positions at institutions including Princeton, Kyoto, Manchester, Leeds and the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University. In 2002, she returned to the University of Sydney to take up the Chair of Applied Mathematics and became the first female mathematician to hold a Chair there.  Nalini was president of the Australian Mathematical Society from December 2008-September 2010 and was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2008. Nalini is currently chair of the National Committee for Mathematical Sciences.

Vigleik Angeltveit (Early Career lecturer) U. Chicago (USA) /Australian National University

Vigleik Angeltveit received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 2006, working with Haynes Miller. From September 2006 to May 2011 he was a postdoc at the University of Chicago, the last two years on an MSRI fellowship. He joined ANU in July 2011.  Most of his work is in algebraic topology and algebraic K-theory, with a focus on using methods from stable homotopy theory to understand the algebraic K-theory of rings.


 

Mick Roberts (ANZIAM lecturer) Massey University, NZ

Mick Roberts is Professor in Mathematical Biology at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. His research interest is in understanding the epidemiology of infectious diseases and optimising strategies for their control, using modern methods of mathematical analysis and developing new methods as necessary. Mick has a B.Sc. in aeronautical engineering from Bristol, an M.Sc. in applicable mathematics from Cranfield and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Victoria University in Wellington. He worked for the Crown Research Institute AgResearch for many years, developing models for infectious diseases of animals. He joined Massey University in 2003, where he is now the discipline leader for mathematics in the Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, and a Professor in the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study. Mick has been a Christensen Fellow at St Catherine's College Oxford, and a Visiting Research Professor at Utrecht University. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

John Sader University of Melbourne

John E Sader is Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne, Australia. He leads an interdisciplinary theoretical group ( Sader Research Group ) studying a range of topics including the dynamic response of nanoparticles under femtosecond laser excitation, mechanics of nanoelectromechanical devices, high Reynolds number flow of thin films and rarefied gas dynamics in nanoscale systems. 

Hiroshi Matano University of Tokyo

Hiroshi Matano's research is focused mainly on the qualitative theory of nonlinear diffusion equations and elliptic equations. Currently, he is interested in travelling waves in heterogeneous diffusive media and their homogenization limits. Other important research themes include blow-up in nonlinear heat equations and the interfacial motion arising in the singular limit of diffusion equations.

Paul Tod University of Oxford

Paul Tod was an undergraduate in Cambridge and went to Oxford for the D.Phil., supervised briefly by Dennis Sciama and then by Roger Penrose. His thesis was on 'Spinning particles in general relativity and twistor theory'. After a 2-year post-doc in Pittsburgh, he went back to Oxford on a sequence of post-docs before finally becoming a University Lecturer and Fellow of St John's in 1983, where he's been ever since. Professor Tod has mostly worked in general relativity and twistor theory, with excursions into various parts of differential geometry. He has made several visits to Australia, spending time in Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra, but this will be his first visit to Wollongong.  

George Willis University of Newcastle

George Willis is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Newcastle, NSW. The main focus of his current research is an investigation of the structure of totally disconnected, locally compact groups. Various classes of such groups, such as p-adic Lie groups and automorphism groups of locally nite graphs for example, arise in dierent branches of mathematics and the overall aim of the research is to determine to what extent these known groups exhaust all the possibilities. He came to this research through previous work in functional analysis, in which field he is known for contributions to the theories of Banach algebras, Banach spaces and abstract harmonic analysis. He received his PhD from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1981 and held a number of positions at universities in Canada and Australia before taking up a position at the University of Newcastle.