November 2014 NewsletterMathematics and Statistics

Congratulations to Alan Williams, who has successfully completed his Masters degree. The examiners were extremely impressed by the calibre of his thesis.

- Mark Hickman

Chennai Mathematics Institute – MoUThe University of Canterbury has recently signed aMemorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Chennai Mathematics Institute (CMI) in India, a university dedicated to Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, and Computer Science.

The CMI (http://www.cmi.ac.in) is a centre ofexcellence for teaching and research and is funded by both private and government sources with strong national and international scholarly networks. Both institutions are hoping to develop links between the two universities.

If you are interested in spending a sabbatical there,or making a short research visit, please contact Clemency Montelle.

Welcome to our new Arrivals

Daniel GerhardDaniel Gerhard arrived this month from Germany to take up his position as a statistical consultant/lecturer with a focus on Applied Statistics. Previously, he was a Postdoc at the Institute of Biostatistics at Leibniz University, Hanover, Germany, where he also finished his doctorate dealing with likelihood-based inference and multiplicity adjustment of simultaneous confidence intervals.

Daniel is not a Statistician by training but, rather, educated in Horticulture where he discovered an interest in planning and analyzing agricultural field trials. From there, he got more involved in Applied Statistics. His research interests cover a wide range from nonlinear and hierarchical modelling to model selection and simultaneous inference. Recently, he’s been kept busy with dose-response analysis in the area of toxicology and biological sciences.

Daniel appreciates the warm welcome he has received and is looking forward to working with everyone. He is based in Room 611 (extn 3644).

Yan ChenPhD student Yan Chen, who hails from China, arrived last month and is based in Room 521 (extn 7853). Yan has a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from China and a Master’s degree in Actuarial Science from the UK. Her supervisor is Patrick W Saart and, while the topic for her PhD is not yet finalized, she’s studying functional data analysis and hoping to explore its application in Finance. She likes learning about different statistical models and methods and then applying them to financial problems. Yan’s other interests include swimming, tennis, and piano.

Research Tip from David WallI have found that although I enjoy working on research problems alone, it is a lot more fun when you are doing it with others. They keep you at it, and keep you to deadlines. To further your research career, most of you will find research collaboration is necessary, probably essential. This is something that never used to be pointed out when I started;fortunately I learnt. So, having had a publication in an area that you are passionately interested in, find a good research group overseas working in a similar area. Spend time in that group fostering a good working relationship with them so that joint work ensues. Ensure that it is not just oldies, but has a good number of researchers of similar age to yourself. Do not publish with all of them because you will need independent referees later in your career.

Raaz Sainudiin gave a talk on Catalan Coefficients and Some Distributions on Finite Rooted Binary Treesat the Cornell Discrete Geometry and Combinatorics Seminar, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, on 27 October. He will also be giving a talk on A Short Introduction to Interval Analysis at a City College of New York Mathematics Colloquium, NY, USA, on 20 November 2014.

PhD student Shakira Suwan has been invited to give an oral presentation this month at the 2014 Bayes on the Beach Conference in Queensland, Australia. Her talk, entitled Empirical Bayes Estimation for the Stochastic Blockmodel, will be one of only ten invited presentations at the 3-day conference.

Congratulations!Above left: Congratulations to Phillipa Williams and Steve Gourdie, who celebrated their engagement this month and are planning to marry in January. Above right: Congratulations also to first-time grandparents Douglas and Viv Bridges, who are currently in San Francisco getting acquainted with Declan Barker Bridges, seen here with babysitter Stanley.

Qatar WorkshopJennifer Brown was in Qatar in October conducting a workshop on Environmental Statistics.

This photo shows Jennifer with two of the participants and co-presenter Dr Trent McDonald from Western Technology Inc, USA, all managing to smilethrough the 40-degree heat.

Conferences and Visits

Darwin's regret - what maths can tell us about the evolution of lifeLast month, Mike Steel presented public lectures in Nelson, Queenstown and Wanaka sponsored by the Allan Wilson Centre and organised locally by the Royal Society branches. The talks highlighted the way that mathematics can help in the study of evolution (with some practical demonstrations of stochastic processes, using coloured balls and breaking sticks), along with quotes from Charles Darwin showing how he wished he'd learned something more of the "great leading principles of mathematics." The talks werewell attended, including our former HOD Peter Renaud at the Nelson meeting. The talk in Queenstown was at the main high school and included teachers, pupils and members of the public.

Papers Submitted

Francis, A.R. and Steel, M. (2014): Detecting reticulate evolution using distance measures, Mathematical Biosciences.

Hagen, O., Hartmann, K., Steel, M. and Stadler, T. (2013): Age-dependent speciation explains empirical tree shape distribution, Systematic Biology.

Hordijk, W., Smith, J. and Steel, M. (2014): Algorithms for detecting and analyzing autocatalytic sets, Algorithms in Molecular Biology

Roch, S. and Steel, M. (2014): Likelihood-based tree reconstruction on a concatenation of alignments can be positively misleading, Theoretical Population Biology.

Sainudiin, R., Thatte, B., and Veber, A.: Ancestries of a Recombining Diploid Population, UCDMS Research Report 2014/3, 43 pages, 2014.

Scotland, R.W. and Steel, M. (2014): Circumstances in which parsimony but not compatibility will be provably misleading, Systematic Biology.

Sousa, F.L., Hordijk, W., Steel, M. and Martin, W. (2013): Autocatalytic sets in the metabolic network of E. coli, Journal of Systems Chemistry.

Teng, G., Harlow, J., and Sainudiin, S.: L_1-consistent adaptive multivariate histograms from a randomized queue prioritized for statistically equivalent blocks, UCDMS Research Report 2014/2, 15 pages, 2014.

Papers Accepted

Wichitaksorn, N., Wang, J.J.J., Choy, S.T.B. and Gerlach, R.: Analysing Return Asymmetry and Quantiles through Stochastic Volatility Models using Asymmetric Laplace Error via Uniform Scale Mixtures, accepted by Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry.

Papers Published

Fischer, M., Galla, M., Herbst, L. and Steel, M. (2014): The most parsimonious tree for random data,Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 80: 165 – 168.

McKubre-Jordens, M. (book review 2014): Review of F. Ye, Strict Finitism and the Logic of Mathematical Applications, Philosophy in Review 34(5): 278 – 281.

Molitor, D., Steel, M. and Taylor, A. (2014): The structure of symmetric n-player games when influence and independence collide, Advances in Applied Mathematics (in press).

Mossel, E. and Steel, M. (2014): Majority rule has transition ratio 4 on Yule trees under a 2-state symmetric model, Journal of Theoretical Biology 360: 315 – 318.

Watson, N.A.: Regularity of Boundary Points in the Dirichlet Problem for the Heat Equation, Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society, 90 (2014), 476 - 485.

News from the Library

• Library Liaison Officer for Mathematics and Statistics, Dr Phil Wilson http://bit.ly/NKgZ2J• New books: Librarians’ Picks of the Month http://canterbury.libguides.com/newbooks• New titles for Mathematics and Statistics http://bit.ly/NVj1hV; for Mathematical Statistics

http://bit.ly/MIS2WA; new-titles-list generator http://bit.ly/1brTI3E

From the Web

1. A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs (Scientific American) http://bit.ly/1DOxXaD

2. There’s a New Way to Quantify Structure and Complexity (Science News) http://bit.ly/YBnJcO3. The Odds, Continually Updated [Bayesian statistics] (NY Times) http://nyti.ms/1pETqct

a. critiqued: A Poor Description of the Monty Hall Problem (EvolutionBlog) http://bit.ly/10CJlr04. How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math (Nautilus) http://bit.ly/1rcCfyH5. Brain-Training Companies Get Advice from Some Academics, Criticism from Others (Chronicle of

Higher Education) http://bit.ly/1yZ96336. One-sided Scepticism: Research Funding Edition (Offsetting Behaviour) http://bit.ly/1vwg8HG7. Guest Post: Phill Jones on the Changing Role of the Postdoc and Why Publishers Should Care

(Scholarly Kitchen) http://bit.ly/1oKRi2T8. Tools for Evaluating Scholarly Journals (Scientific American) http://bit.ly/1rDgfC3

a. UC Library resourcesi. “Scholarly Publication” (see under tabs ‘Measuring Impact’ and ‘Open Access’)

http://canterbury.libguides.com/scholarlyii. Ulrichsweb (noted in Scientific American article) http://bit.ly/1ru0ADy

9. Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals (Google Scholar Blog) http://bit.ly/1w1UywT

10. What Really Drives Academic Citations? (Discover Magazine) http://bit.ly/1vkLowI11. Should We Put Our Money Where Our Citations Are? (Scientific American) http://bit.ly/1qwXnjZ12. View From Nowhere [cultural ideology of Big Data] (The New Inquiry) http://bit.ly/1z80GYd13. Garbage in, Garbage out [predatory open-access publications] (Chemistry World) http://rsc.li/1rorjE014. It’s No Joke: Humor Rarely Welcome in Research Write-Ups (Chronicle of Higher Education)

http://bit.ly/1uxrKx915. Digital Native Fallacy: Teachers Still Know Better (Springer) http://bit.ly/1x1WcNb16. The Reader Has No Clothes [eBooks and privacy] (Inside Higher Ed) http://bit.ly/1tmRTPy

And on the lighter side...

• The Flying McCoys, October 9, 2014 http://bit.ly/1wBA5gp• Percentage of Your Day You Spend in Meetings (PHD Comics) http://bit.ly/1CT3Ewk• Book Titles: Why Not Catch-21? (Christchurch City Libraries Blog) http://bit.ly/1ovaib2

John Arnold | Mathematics/Statistics Liaison Librarianhttp://canterbury.libguides.com/profile/JohnArnold