Speakers

Iain Aitchison completed an MSc at Melbourne University on 4-dimensional manifolds, and a PhD at Berkeley in 1984 on knots in 3 and 4-dimensions. After a brief stay at Macquarie University working on combinatorics and category theory, he returned to Melbourne working on low-dimensional topology and geometry. His current research interests also include applications of low-dimensional topology and geometry in mathematical physics, combinatorics and number theory. He also enjoys riding/racing bicycles, playing classical guitar, and will be happily parting company with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Melbourne University at the end of 2007.

Andrew Bassom started his PhD in boundary layer theory at the University of Exeter (UK) in 1985. He stayed put for 20 years; first as a postdoc, then a lecturer and finally a reader. In 2005 he moved to Perth to take up a chair in applied mathematics at UWA.

Research interests include boundary-layer theory, fluid & solid mechanics and differential equations. Outside work he is a keen scuba diver.

Dr Kais Hamza received his Ph.D. at the Laboratoire de Probabilités, Paris VI. His thesis was on the study of martingales associated with regenerative sets. His research interests have since widened and now include probability, stochastic processes as well as their applications, in particular to biology and finance. In 1989, he migrated to Australia and joined the University of Melbourne. He has been with the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University since 1999.

Markus is fascinated by the computational challenges posed by high dimensions and ill-posedness (where the results do not depend continuously on the data), applications in machine learning and biology and the mathematical theory which reveals initially hidden computational tractability. He is also interested in implementations - now mostly in Python - of efficient parallel numerical algorithms. Markus is a Senior Fellow at the ANU, works one day a week in the statistical machine learning group in NICTA and is member of the ARC Centre in Bioinformatics.

Markus has started tutoring in high school, has taught introductory courses in numerical analysis at the ETH in Switzerland and advanced courses at the ANU. He does also enjoy coming to the AMSI summerschools. He has taught twice at AMSI before, once in Sydney last year and before that at the first AMSI summerschool in Melbourne. He was director of the AMSI summerschool when it was hosted by the ANU in 2005.

Professor Kazdan received his Ph.D. at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He then was on the faculty of Harvard University for several years. Since 1966 he has been a member of the Mathematics Department at the University of Pennsylvania. His main research interests are in partial differential equations and differential geometry.

Marty Ross is a mathematical bum. He ran away from America at the age of 2, to join the circus. After some controversy involving an elephant, he returned to America to do his PhD on minimal surfaces at Stanford University. After a stint at Rice University, he came back to Australia. Since then, he has wandered from Maths Department to Maths Department, aimless but happy.

Moshe Sniedovich is a Reader at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the University of Melbourne. He obtained his BSc from the Technion (Israel, 1968) and his PhD from the University of Arizona (USA, 1976). Prior to joining the University of Melbourne in 1989, he worked at Princeton University (1976/7), IBM (USA, 1977/9), and CSIR (South Africa, 1979-89), He served as Vice President (Representing the Asia Pacific region) of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS,1998-2003) and is in charge of IFORS tutORial project. He has served on the program committees of numerous international conferences and workshops.

Moshe's research interests are in the areas of sequential decision-making, decision-making under uncertainty, composite optimisation and interactive computing and modelling. He published one book and over eighty articles, and developed numerous web-based tutorial modules for applied mathematics and operations research subjects. He is on the editorial board of a number of international journals and is a member of the executive committee of the Australian Society for Operations Research (ASOR).

More details about Moshe can be found at: www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~moshe/.

John Stillwell was born in Melbourne and educated at Melbourne High School and Melbourne University. He then did a Ph.D. in computability theory at MIT, after which he returned to Australia and taught at Monash for 31 years.