Keynote Speakers

Leigh Wood

Director, Learning and Teaching Studies
Division of Economic and Financial Studies
Macquarie University, Australia

Engineering students: what do they think of mathematics and how do they think it will be used in their future?

I report on a study of 1200 students in five countries where we asked students what they thought about mathematics and its use in their studies and work. I will describe the responses of engineering students and implication for teaching.

Biography

My engineering students say I have moved to the dark side - mathematics. I started in Engineering and moved to an honours degree in applied mathematics. My PhD is in transition of mathematics graduates to the workforce. After teaching mathematics for many years, I have recently moved further to the dark side where my major role is working with lecturers to improve student learning. I am very interested in how our teaching engages students in their own learning and how students view their learning.

John Hunter

Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre
University of Tasmania

Sea Level Rise: What Are We In For?

Climate change will probably raise sea level globally by around 0.5 metres during this century. This will have a significant effect on the frequency of flooding events. There is inherent uncertainty both in the occurrence of present- day sea-level extremes (e.g. when will the next one occur?) and in the projections of future sea-level change (e.g. how high will mean sea level be in 2100?). I will show how these uncertainties may be combined to yield statistical tools for use by policy-makers, planners, developers and builders.

Biography

• A short CV
• A long CV

Stephen Cowley

Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
University of Cambridge, England

Exponentially small disturbances as a route to turbulence in unsteady fluid flows

There are many fluids flows, indeed physical phenomenon, where there are disparate scales that can affect the evolution of the system. For instance, flow over an aircraft in some sense has an "aircraft" scale, yet the turbulence within the air flow has a much smaller scale. Similarly atmospheric Rossby waves have an "earth" scale, yet can be unstable to much smaller scales.

We will discuss how the small scales arise from large scales, and whether or not small scales are "inevitable"? For example, is it possible to carefully design a "noise-free" experiment so that air flow over an aircraft wing is free from turbulence.

We will argue by means of scaling arguments and numerical calculations that short-scales evolve naturally out of initial conditions once exponentially small terms are accounted for correctly and conclude that "noise" can precipitate the generation of short scales, but it is not necessary.

Martyn Nash

Bioengineering Institute and Dept. of Engineering Science
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Multi-scale electro-mechanics of the heart

Mathematical modelling is a useful tool for investigating mechanisms underlying the heart's electrical and mechanical function and dysfunction. Computational models of cardiac mechanics have developed over the last 30 years to include finite deformation nonlinear elasticity, anisotropic and heterogeneous material properties, and accurate geometric representations of ventricular anatomy and tissue microstructure. Models of the heart's electrical function have evolved from empirical low-order mathematical representations to detailed biophysical cellular models based on ionic currents, resulting in systems of reaction-diffusion equations that are typically integrated over discretised domains. Here I describe a computational framework for modelling and analysing cardiac electro-mechanical function based on a hybrid numerical approach that embeds finite difference models of electrical activity into the material coordinates of deforming finite element models of myocardial mechanics. Such techniques are useful for elucidating mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmogenesis and compromised pump function, and have the potential for investigating therapeutic strategies such as ventricular resynchronization and arrhythmia prevention.

Ilene Carpenter

Applications Specialist
Silicon Graphics (SGI)

High Productivity Standards-Based Computing for Weather Forecasting and Climate Modeling

Weather forecasting and climate modeling both require very high performance computing and data management solutions. Climate modeling in particular generates huge amounts of data for subsequent analysis. I will present an overview of SGI products being used by leading organizations around the world in these areas and discuss SGI's philosophy for designing systems to maximize the productivity of scientists.

Biography

Dr. Carpenter started her career at Cray Research Inc. as a computational chemist working in Cray's applications group. She transitioned to working on environmental applications in 1995 and later became technical lead for weather and climate applications at SGI. She currently manages the Scientific Applications and Benchmarking group at SGI which includes computational chemistry, bioinformatics, weather and climate applications as well as the benchmarking systems engineering team.

Dr. Carpenter has experience parallelizing and optimizing a variety of weather and climate models and is particularly interested in the methods and architectures used for high performance scalable computing. She holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an A.B. in Chemistry from Cornell University. She did post-doctoral research in computational chemistry at UC Irvine and the University of Minnesota before joining Cray Research in 1992.