Education Afternoon
The Program Committee warmly invites you to attend the Education Afternoon of the 53rd Annual Meeting Australian Mathematical Society. This free event is specially designed for teachers, undergraduates and prospective mathematics teachers. Conference attendees are also welcome.
The Education Afternoon features a range of exciting, informative and thought-provoking sessions. Listen to short non-technical talks describing new mathematical discoveries and applications, participate in a panel discussion `The Future is Mathematics', mingle with speakers and colleagues and a special reception for teachers, and attend a public lecture by the world-famous Adelaidean, and 2006 Fields Medallist, Terence Tao.
Certificates of attendance will be issued.
For enquiries contact Amie Albrecht: amie.albrecht@unisa.edu.au or (08) 8302 3754.
Download the Education Afternoon flyer.
Timetable --- Tuesday 29 September 2009
3.00pm - Registration and Afternoon Tea
To register for the free Education Afternoon, please use the special registration facility located here.
Free parking is available for the first 30 registrants.
3.30pm - Welcome by Education Afternoon Chair, David Panton, University of South Australia
Speakers
5.00pm - Interactive panel discussion --- The Future is Mathematics
Moderator: Carol Moule, Vice President, Mathematical Association of South Australia
Young people are growing up in a world where mathematics underpins nearly every aspect of our lives from the delivery of our electricity to our leisure activities. What do you think school mathematics of the future should be like? What implications would this have on current curriculum and pedagogies? What role might technology play?
6.00 pm - Teachers' Reception
Attend a convivial reception with nibbles and drinks. Mingle with the speakers and others and make new contacts.
7.00 pm - Public Lecture --- Terence Tao: Structure and randomness in the prime numbers
"God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers" - Paul Erdos
The prime numbers are a fascinating blend of both structure (for instance, almost all primes are odd) and randomness. It is widely believed that beyond the "obvious" structures in the primes, the primes otherwise behave as if they were distributed randomly; this "pseudorandomness" then underlies our belief in many unsolved conjectures about the primes, from the twin prime conjecture to the Riemann hypothesis. This pseudorandomness has been frustratingly elusive to actually prove rigorously, but recently there has been progress in capturing enough of this pseudorandomness to establish new results about the primes, such as the fact that they contain arbitrarily long progressions. We survey some of these developments in this talk.
Speakers
Jonathan Borwein
The Inverse Symbolic Calculator: From Numbers to Mathematics
We are all familiar with the uses and misuses of calculators in the classroom and may take it for granted that they require mathematics as input and typically give numbers as output. I wish to show the power of calculators that invert this process: numbers go in and mathematics comes out. I shall demonstrate the Inverse Symbolic Calculator, at http://ddrive.cs.dal.ca/~isc, and its implementation inside Maple as the identify function and will illustrate their use in teaching and research as tools of discovery.
Jonathan M. Borwein received his mathematics B.A. from the University of Western Ontario in 1971 and a D.Phil. from Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, in 1974. He currently holds a Laureate Professorship at University of Newcastle and prior to that a Canada Research Chair in the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a past President of the Canadian Mathematical Society. His primary current research interests are in nonlinear functional analysis, optimization, and experimental (computationally-assisted) mathematics.
Mike Eastwood
On circles, lines, and spheres: thinking outside the box
`Thinking outside the box' was recently voted as Britain's most despised business jargon. Nevertheless, it and its two-dimensional version `thinking outside the square' sometimes describe exactly how mathematicians think. I shall explain some examples. The talk will consist mostly of pictures.
Michael Eastwood received a BA in Mathematics from the University of Oxford in 1973 and a PhD from Princeton University, as a Fulbright Scholar, in 1976. He is currently an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow at the Australian National University and prior to that an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the University of Adelaide. His primary research interests are in differential geometry, integral geometry, complex geometry, and the representation theory of Lie groups.
Kerry Landman
Frogs and mathematics
Translocations are widely used to reintroduce threatened species to areas where they have disappeared. Mathematical modelling of translocations can help zoologists understand animal behaviour, in particular the interaction between two populations of the same species. I will discuss some of our work on the threatened Maud Island frog, a rare New Zealand species that until recently inhabited a single island in the Marlborough Sounds. These frogs are very unusual -- for example, they live under rocks and not in water, and they do not croak!
Kerry Landman obtained her PhD in mathematics from The University of Melbourne, followed by six years working as an applied mathematician in USA. She returned to Melbourne to join Siromath, a mathematical sciences consulting firm, before joining the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests arise from real-world problems. She is currently collaborating with experimentalists in the areas of developmental biology and tissue engineering.
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