Rodney Nillsen
School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics
Austin Keane Building
University of Wollongong
NSW, AUSTRALIA 2522
email: nillsen@uow.edu.au
"Driving to work, there was an amazingly vivid, complete and long-lasting rainbow. There's a rational explanation, of course. But each explanation has its own level, and the phenomenon always transcends the explanation. That is what makes science possible -- and wonder also." .....Read more current comments.
".... in intellectual terms, postmodernism and market economics, when applied to the sphere of the intellect, produce very much the same situation, for both have the effect of reducing valid argument to mere opinion, and the attainment of insight to nothing more than individual preference and a question of how it is perceived and by how many".....Read more about intellectual culture in universities.
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The book Randomness and Recurrence in Dynamical Systems was published by the Mathematical Association of America in 2010 as volume 31 in the Carus Monographs Series .....Read more about this book, and read more about the ideas in this book. 		Read or read about
  • The research-teaching nexus
  • Richard Dawkins and the God hypothesis
  • The irony of American history
  • How to leading-edge your objectives -- read Rod's submission to the Bradley enquiry
  • Pentagons, the golden ratio, and the irrationality of the square root of five


  • The Research & Ideas Page
  • Mathematical quotations
  • Mathematics Teachers' Day at the University of Wollongong



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    On September 9th, 2011, a conference was held at the Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia, in honour of the life and work of the Slovak-Australian mathematician Igor Kluvánek (1931-1993), pictured. You can read a copy of the paper "Igor Kluvánek: his, life, achievements and influence in Australia", given there. You can also read some Igor Kluvánek quotations. The paper was written for a general audience, and as well as covering Igor Kluvánek's achievements in research, also discussed are his exposition of mathematical ideas, his philosophical and religious writings, and his personality.
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    The picture is of the Tatra Mountains, in Slovakia. You may read excerpts from the paper "Changes in culture and purpose in Australian universities: 1988 to the present". This paper was the basis for a seminar presented at the conference held from 5th-6th September 2011 in Badin, Slovakia, on the theme (translated into English) "The University: place of meeting and confrontation between faith and reason". Other seminars also were given in Slovakia.
    photoYou may download slides from the seminar "Dynamical systems and the Carathéodory definition of a measurable set", given at the Mathematical Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Also, you may download slides from the seminar "Some mathematical analysis without measure theory" given at the University in Banská Bystrica. A seminar was also given at the "Kluvánekfest", held in Ružomberok, see left.