Dear friend of SMRI,

When I wrote the previous newsletter in March, our public lecture for the International Day of Mathematics was just around the corner. You can catch up on Oded Yacobi’s fascinating and engaging talk about the French Revolution and the mathematics of Evariste Galois on our YouTube channel. As I am writing now, we are looking forward to a public lecture during next week’s National Science Week by Holger Dullin on the mathematics of twisting somersaults, which he analysed for Olympians diving from the 10m platform. Other upcoming public events can be found in the links below, and include a day of talks by Quan Lam from the Berkeley Math Circle for primary and high school students and teachers.

With the beginning of semester, our research seminars have started again, and we enjoy hearing about work by our visitors and affiliates. I would like to highlight an upcoming series of lectures that may be of particular interest to both remote and local participants. Following up on the success of Machine Learning for the Working Mathematician, we have now invited experts from industry to tell the research community about mathematical challenges arising in their work on AI. You can join our mailing list if you would like to receive the announcements of the online talks by Francois Charton (Meta), Paul Christiano (Alignment Research Centre), Sadhika Malladi (Princeton, formerly OpenAI), Neel Nanda (DeepMind) and Greg Yang (xAI). The lecture notes, recordings and associated colab notebooks from last year are still available if you would like to learn or brush up on techniques in machine learning. More from the interface of mathematics and AI is in an interesting article recently published in The New York Times featuring SMRI Director Geordie Williamson.

In September 2022, SMRI's communications coordinator Larissa Fedunik had the privilege of interviewing 2012 Abel Prize winner Endre Szemerédi at the 9th Heidelberg Laureate Forum. You can watch the interview with the renowned combinatorialist and hear him speak about the unconventional beginnings of his career, misconceptions about discrete mathematicians, and how computing changed the mathematical landscape.

In wonderful news for the mathematical sciences, two of the seventeen 2023 ARC Laureate Fellowships awarded nationally were given to Professor Gary Froyland (UNSW) and SMRI Director Geordie Williamson respectively. Our team at SMRI is looking forward to the arrival of early and mid-career researchers and doctoral students associated with Geordie’s fellowship and the knowledge, energy and initiative they will bring to the institute.

We also congratulate our Scientific Advisory Board members Serena Dipierro (UWA) and Rachel Wang (Sydney). An ARC Future Fellowship was awarded to Serena; and Rachel received a Moran Medal for 2023 by the Australian Academy of Science and she features in a list of 60 historical and current prominent Australian statisticians by the Statistical Society of Australia to mark its 60th anniversary.

The First International Congress of Basic Science in Beijing honoured Simon Riche and SMRI Director Geordie Williamson, as well as SMRI Board Member Akshay Venkatesh and his collaborator Brian Lawrence with 2023 Frontiers of Science Awards. The awards highlight influential papers in different areas of science and provide an interesting snapshot of published work in the past five years.

My last congratulation in this newsletter goes to Bregje Pauwels for securing an ongoing position at Macquarie University. In her almost three years as an affiliate at SMRI, she was the custodian of formal algebra seminars, the Informal Friday Seminar, and organised regular “Shut Up and Write” sessions and retreats for doctoral students and postdocs. Her initiatives have become ongoing activities at SMRI, and we are glad that Bregje will not be too far away! We are currently looking for new talent to fill her shoes with a closing date of 17 August 2023.

Farewells are regular at an institute with many visitors and postdoctoral fellows. The banner image shows a farewell that was more emotional than usual. Kostiantyn Ralchenko and his family spent almost seven months in Australia funded by our ongoing Ukrainian Visitor Program for displaced mathematical scientists. During their time in Australia, Kostiantyn and his wife Svitlana were still in touch with their students and teaching classes online at their home institution in Kyiv. Classes that were at times disrupted by sirens, shelling or taken from makeshift abodes. They have now moved to France to be closer to family and in a time-zone slightly better adapted to the next semester. A return home is still nowhere to be seen on the horizon and we feel privileged to support Ukrainian researchers to temporarily continue their research in a secure and welcoming environment.

The research environment at our institute is thriving. We have been able to bring back rituals to be present, creative and thoughtful. These include specialised research talks and colloquia aimed at broad mathematical audiences, public talks and outreach activities, informal discussions in the common room, quiet spaces to think and write. Rituals filled with ideas by our visitors and academic staff and enabled by our thoughtful professional staff and generous donor support.

— Professor Stephan Tillmann

In this talk, we’ll explore the principles behind this phenomenon. The mathematics underpinning the reorientation uses beautiful symmetries to explain the conservation laws of dynamical systems.