Issue: March 2004
News
Our division of mathematicians calculate
HOW TO REVERSE THE BRAIN DRAIN
La Trobe’s Department of Mathematics has figured out how to reverse the brain drain.
Its innovative research environment and other activity are attracting top level academics, thus helping to reverse the brain drain reported in a number of articles in the main stream press recently.
There have been a number of significant recent initiatives.
Reinout Quispel, whose personal Chair at La Trobe was recently announced, is part of a team of thirteen Australian mathematicians awarded a grant of $11,000,000 for an Australian Research Council Centre for Mathematical and Statistical Modelling of Complex Systems, which commenced in 2003.
A major focus of this project is to furnish a number of PhD scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships to provide much needed opportunities for young Australian researchers, and to attract talented people from overseas. Professor Quispel is also the organiser of an ARC Centre of Excellence Workshop on geometric integration and scientific computation in complex systems that took place at La Trobe in December 2003.
In another major achievement, Associate Professor Grant Cairns won an Australian Research Council Discovery grant for 2003-2005, which funds the salary of research officer, Dr Yury Nikolayevsky.
Dr Nikolayevsky obtained his PhD from the University of Leningrad, but he has become an Australian citizen and is now making remarkable contributions to Australian mathematics. Together, Associate Professor Cairns and Dr Nikolayevsky run a research group on geometry, which over the coming three years, will attract to La Trobe a number of researchers from France, Spain and Canada.
In addition, Associate Professor Brian Davey runs La Trobe’s very successful Algebra Group, which has attracted to La Trobe prominent mathematicians from Oxford University and several key American and European universities. These mathematicians have made lengthy stays at La Trobe to undertake joint research-and more visits are already scheduled for the coming years.
Another prominent young mathematician currently at La Trobe is Dr Marcel Jackson from Tasmania-the sort of researcher often attracted overseas. However, Dr Jackson chose to bring his Australian Research Council Fellowship to La Trobe, in order to participate in Associate Professor Davey's Algebra Group. They organised the Victorian Algebra Conference which took place at La Trobe in late September/ early October and which included a Workshop on Universal Algebraic Techniques starring Professor George McNulty of the University of South Carolina.
This followed another successful international mathematical event at La Trobe in July. Associate Professor Geoff Prince organised an international conference that attracted more than two dozen leading international figures from the field of differential equations and differential geometry. Based on the overwhelming success of the workshop, it is likely to become a biennial event.
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