UK Nonlinear News, May 1999

Nonlinear Science in Australia

Harvinder Sidhu's regular column

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Harvinder Sidhu research interests are in combustion, in particular analysing reactions in chemical reactors within a dynamical systems framework. He is currently a member of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Australian Defence Force Academy. He writes a column covering nonlinear science in Australia.

We are looking for additional columnists to report back from the different corners of the nonlinear world. If you would like to become another of them, do contact the editors at uk-nonl@ucl.ac.uk.

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The 35th Australia - New Zealand Applied Mathematics Conference (ANZIAM 99)

The annual meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ANZIAM) group took place at Mollymook (located approximately 200km from Sydney), Australia from 7-11 February 1999. There were approximately 120 delegates, resulting in around 100 talks. As in previous years, the prestigious T.M. Cherry Prize was awarded for the best student presentation, and this year's winner was Ms Elena Ostrovskaya for her polished talk Multi-hump optical solitons: Existence and Stability. As usual the talks constituted a wide range of topics from applied mathematics including fluid mechanics, optics, epidemiology, mathematical biology, industrial mathematics, numerical methods and combustion problems just to name a few. The invited plenary speakers were:

J. Blake (University of Birmingham, UK) - Acoustic cavitation, sonoluminescence and sonochemistry
J. Buckmaster (University of Illinois, USA) - Ignition fronts and failure waves in combustion
N. Ibragimov (University of North-West, S Africa) - Applied group analysis
R. Pech (CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology, Australia) - Population models for antipodes
D. Ralph (University of Melbourne) - Mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints
G. Steven (University of Sydney) -Recent developments in evolutionary structural optimisation

In addition to the above speakers, specialist sessions were organised and these were lead by
B. Barnes (Australian National University) - Environmental mechanics
N. Boland (University of Melbourne) - Integer programming
D. Farrow (Murdoch University) - Buoyancy and convection
M. Hegland (Australian National University) - Numerical differentiation
K. Landman (University of Melbourne) - Industrial processes
S. Scott (Australian National University) - Relativity
D. Stump (University of Queensland) - Nonlinear solid mechanics

All agreed that despite the bad weather the conference ran smoothly and that the delegates had a good time. The organising committee must be commended for the success of this meeting.