NZMASP
2014
Aotearoa Lodge and Conference Centre, Whitianga
17-20 November 2014
Sponsors
We thankfully acknowledge our generous sponsors:
We would like to extend special thanks to the following people
for their support and assistance in making this year’s conference
possible: Vivien Kirk; Marston Conder; Claire Postlethwaite; Mike
Plank; Charles Semple; Stephen Joe; Geoﬀ Whittle; Alex James;
Gaven Martin and Winston Sweatman.
New Zealand Mathematics
and Statistics Postgraduate
Conference
The annual New Zealand Mathematics and Statistics Postgraduate
conference is organised by students for students. It provides an
opportunity for postgraduates throughout New Zealand to network,
practise presentations and gain experience of conference etiquette
in a relaxed and supportive environment. This year the conference
is in Whitianga on the Coromandel Peninsula.
Starting in 2006, the South Island Mathematics and Statistics
Postgraduate Conference (SIMaSP) was held at Queenstown for
two days. Twenty six postgraduate students and staﬀ from the
Universities of Canterbury and Otago attended. It was such a
success that the first New Zealand Mathematics and Statistics
Postgraduate Conference (NZMASP) was held in November 2007,
also in Queenstown. Since then the NZMASP conference has been
held in the following places:
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
Whitianga;
Foxton Beach;
Westport;
Lower Hutt;
Shakespear Park;
Cass Field Station.
Shakespear Park 2012
Whitianga
2008, 2014
Foxton Beach 2009
Lower Hutt 2011
Westport 2010
Cass Field Station 2013
Queenstown
2006, 2007
NZMASP 2014
Welcome Reception
There will be a welcome reception at On the Beach Backpackers
at 6pm on Monday.
The Venue
All talks will take place at the Aotearoa Lodge and Conference
Centre, 70 Racecourse Rd.
Accommodation
Accommodation for students is at On the Beach Backpackers Lodge,
46 Buﬀalo Beach Rd. See the room allocation plan on the next
page.
Conference Dinner
Wednesday 7pm at the Indian buﬀet at Sangam Indian Cuisine,
13/1 Blacksmith Ln.
Prizes
sponsored by
There will be prizes for the top four talks as chosen by participants
of the conference. A voting slip is on the last page of this booklet.
Fill it out and post it in the boxes provided by 11:30 on Thursday
20th November.
Excursion
Wednesday afternoon is a free afternoon for you to spend how you
wish. Here are some suggestions, use the internet or talk to the
organisers for more information:
Whitianga Rock Walk This is a short walking track in
the Whitianga Rock Scenic and Historic Reserve just across
the Whitianga harbour.
Hot Water Beach and Cathedral Cove These are some
famous and equally as beautiful beaches on the east coast of
the Coromandel peninsula just east of Whitianga. There are
tour buses departing from Whitianga that can take you there.
Water Sports Kayaks and boats are available for hire, there
are also good diving spots and glass bottom boat tours to
experience Mercury Bay without getting wet.
Room Allocations
Unit
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
B1
B1
B1
B1
B1
B1
B1
B2
B2
B2
B2
B2
B2
B2
B2
Room
Single
F1
F2
F3
F4
R1
R2
R3
R4
D1
D2
D3
D4
Double
Twin 1
Twin 2
Dorm 1
Dorm 2
Dorm 3
Dorm 4
F1
F2
F3
F4
R1
R2
R3
R4
Name
Susan Jowett
Andrea Babylon
Heather Davidson
Louise McMillan
Paula Bran
Jeremie Morenhout
Tuan Chien
Jurij Vol˘ci˘c
Barak Shani
Timm Treskatis
Paul Cordue
Saeed Farjami
Ben Lawrence
Lynette OBrien/Graeme OBrien
Rodelyn Avila
Lisa Hall
Leon Escobar Diaz
Jerome Cao
Rory Ellis
Jack Simpson
Cris Hasan
Peter Langfield
Sebastian Boie
Jose Mujica
Jennifer Creaser
Sylvia Han
Maree Hawkins
Rebecca Turner
Unit
B6
B6
B6
B6
B6
B6
Female dorm
Female dorm
Female dorm
Female dorm
Female dorm
Female dorm
Female dorm
Female dorm
Female dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Male dorm
Room
Twin 1
Twin 2
Dorm 1
Dorm 2
Dorm 3
Dorm 4
Dorm 1
Dorm 2
Dorm 3
Dorm 4
Dorm 5
Dorm 6
Dorm 7
Dorm 8
Dorm 9
Dorm 1
Dorm 2
Dorm 3
Dorm 4
Dorm 5
Dorm 6
Dorm 7
Dorm 8
Dorm 9
Dorm 10
Dorm 11
Dorm 12
Name
Duy Ho
Tan Do
Andrew Probert
Mathew Grice
Abu Zar Md Shafiullah
Will Critchlow
Howida Alfran
Rachelle Binny
Tina Li
Allanah Kenny
Carolyn Irons
Weijuan Zhang
Emma Greenbank
Giovanna Le Gros
Jasmine Hall
Ali Zaidi
Amjad Ali
Carlo Danieli
Liam McMahon
Chris King
Paul Brown
Giulio Dalla Riva
Hafiz Mohd
Andrus Giraldo
Abhishek Bhardwaj
Jesse Hart
James Hannam
Top tips for student talks
By last year’s plenary speakers: Alex James; Jeanette McLeod
and Elena Moltchenova.
Slides: Beamer, powerpoint, ...? Nobody cares. As long as your
slides look nice and are informative that’s all that matters! Check
them in a large room beforehand, can you read everything from
the back row? Do all the lines on your graphs show up on a
low resolution projector? Don’t get carried away with fancy slide
eﬀects, revealing things one at a time should aid understanding
and not just jazz up a too long list of bullet points. As a rule of
thumb no more than two eﬀects per talk. Spell-check!
Equations: Research (Fawcett, PNAS, 2012) has shown that
citations decrease as equations per page increase. The same applies
to talks. Try to use English words not mathematical symbols.
Style: Chatty talks are nice but don’t sacrifice mathematical
formality to achieve this. Experienced speakers who do this took
years to perfect it and started oﬀ by giving formal talks.
Facilities: Videos and movies are great but check they work
on the conference system and have a back up plan if they don’t.
Drawing on a whiteboard usually comes across as poor preparation,
as though you couldn’t be bothered to prepare a decent slide.
We strongly recommend you avoid doing it unless there is a true
pedagogical need.
Less is more: Don’t include your entire thesis. The aim of a talk
is to enthuse, educate and entertain your audience. Many good
speakers choose one (often small) concept from their research and
explain this to the audience. If your research topic is particularly
obscure this may need to be a fairly basic concept!
Audience: Remember to adapt your talk to your audience. A
graph theory conference participant has a diﬀerent background to a
more general conference participant. Be sure to define your terms!
For more general audiences you should spend some time motivating
your work. This is especially important for pure maths topics.
Preparation: Good talks take time to prepare. It’s very obvious
to your audience when you’ve just thrown together a talk at the last
minute. They’ve taken time from their busy schedule to listen to
you. It’s quite insulting when you haven’t taken a similar amount
of time to prepare.
Body language: Enthusiasm is a wonderful thing :-) If you don’t
look interested why will your audience be interested. Look at the
audience, make eye-contact with people. Try not to spend your
whole talk talking to the whiteboard, screen or floor.
Laser pointers: These are a curse to the nervous, they make
it obvious if your hand is shaking! For smaller rooms consider
just using your hand to point instead. If you do use one, use it
sparingly, don’t wave it around the screen constantly, it can make
people feel seasick.
Questions: Answering questions after your talk is important.
But if you do not know the answer, it is fine to say so and to follow
up later. Do not forget to thank the commenter.
Acknowledgements: Research is rarely the product of a single
person. Who is your supervisor? Who funded you? Include
references and make it clear what your contribution is.
Tuesday 18th November
Room 1 Chair Peter Langfield
Room 2 Chair Timm Treskatis
9:00 – 9:20
Graeme O’Brien Discrete Groups of Ali Zaidi Solutions to an advanced
M¨obius Transformations
functional partial diﬀerential equation of the
pantograph-type
9:20 – 9:40
Tan Do From strongly elliptic operators to Carolyn Irons Lineage tracing in collective
degenerate elliptic operators: Core properties cell migration
9:40 – 10:00 Barak Shani The Hidden Number Problem Rachelle
Binny Defining Moments:
and Applications to Bit Security in Finite Spatial Structure in a Model of Collective
Fields
Cell Movement
10:00 – 10:20 Sylvia Han A Mathematical Model of Duy Ho Toroidal Circle Planes
Calcium Dynamics and Saliva Secretion
10:20 – 10:40 Sebastian
Boie Excitation-contraction Jasmine Hall Generalizing the Geometry of
coupling in airway smooth muscle cells
Throws
10:40 – 11:00 Allanah Kenny Calcium Oscillations in Chris King On 5-adic and 7-adic λSmooth Muscle Cells
invariants attached to cyclic cubic number
fields
Program
11:00 – 11:30
Morning Tea
11:30 – 12:30
Igor Klep Linear Matrix Inequalities
12:30 – 1:30
Lunch
Room 1 Chair Andrus Giraldo
Room 2 Chair Tuan Chien
1:30 – 1:50
Paul Brown Bayesian Inference using Low Cris Hasan
Mixed-mode Oscillations
Discrepancy Sequences
and Canard Orbits in Systems of Chemical
Reactions
1:50 – 2:10
Rodelyn Avila The Use of Peak Height Maree Hawkins
Freezing Multiple
Velocity and Peak Weight Velocity for Obesity Timescale Models
Status Prediction
2:10 – 2:30
Xin Li Incorporating competition in a trait- Lynette O’Brien A Study of bursting in
based community assembly model
a Three Dimensional System
2:30 – 2:50
Leon Escobar Diaz Numerical solution Jack Simpson Red Numbers: The Study
of the Cauchy problem for spacetimes with of Mathematics Under Soviet Socialism
spatial topologies S3 or S1 × S2
Tuesday 18th November
5:00 – 5:20
4:40 – 5:00
4:20 – 4:40
3:20 – 4:20
2:50 – 3:20
Afternoon Tea
Caroline Yoon What kind of mathematics educator are you?
Room 1 Chair Jeremie Moerenhout
Room 2 Chair Rachelle Binny
Howida Alfran The edge slide graph of Peter Langfield Interactions of forwardthe n-dimensional cube
and backward-time isochrons
Paul Cordue Characterising Phylogenetic Jose Mujica A Lin’s method approach for
Networks that Display a Tree Twice
detecting canard orbits
Tuan Chien When are two sequences of Jen Creaser The Lorenz system near the
vectors projectively unitarily equivalent?
loss of the foliation condition
Tuesday 18th November
11:00 – 11:30
11:30 – 12:30
10:40 – 11:00
10:20 – 10:40
10:00 – 10:20
9:40 – 10:00
9:20 – 9:40
9:00 – 9:20
Room 2 Chair Sebastian Boie
Louise McMillan Saddlepoint Method:
An Introduction
Abu Zar Md Shafiullah A comparative
study on the error rates and power of selection
criteria for factor screening
Timm Treskatis
Viscoplastic Fluids: Weijuan Zhang Some infinite families of
Laborious but Fun
chiral polytopes
Amjad Ali
A Simplified Model for Matthew Grice Graphs with no odd cycles
Transport in Aquifers
are bipartite - the proof from ‘The Book’
Saeed Farjami Spike adding in Transient Jeremie Moerenhout Chiral Polytopes
dynamics
arising from almost simple groups with socle
P SL(2, q)
Andrea Babylon Modelling Leptospirosis Jerome Cao Uniqueness of Meromorphic
in Livestock and Wildlife
Function and Its k-th Derivative with Two
Weighted Sharing Values
Morning Tea
Maryam Alavi Applied Mathematics in Industry: a “real-world” example
Room 1 Chair Barak Shani
Ben Lawrence Linear matrix inequalities,
spectrahedra, and optimisation
Jurij Vol˘
ci˘
c Noncommutative rational
functions
Wednesday 19th November
2:30pm
7:00pm
2:10 – 2:30
1:50 – 2:10
1:30 – 1:50
12:30 – 1:30
Lunch
Room 1 Chair Paul Cordue
Room 2 Chair Jen Creaser
Will Critchlow Almost every matroid?
Hafiz Mohd Modelling the Distributions
of Competing Species along Environmental
Gradients
Andrew Probert Path Width in Graphs Heather Davidson Geothermal spring
temperature analysis
Susan Jowett
Graphic Connectivity Carlo Danieli Flat Band Models with
Functions
correlated onsite perturbation
Excursion
Conference Dinner
Wednesday 19th November
11:00 – 11:30
11:30 – 12:30
12:30 – 2:00
10:40 – 11:00
10:20 – 10:40
10:00 – 10:20
9:40 – 10:00
9:20 – 9:40
9:00 – 9:20
Room 2 Chair Tan Do
Paula Bran Estimating abundance using
DNA samples
Rory Ellis
Comparing SARIMA and
PARMA models in forecasting retail trade
data
Giulio Dalla Riva The Web and the Tree Lisa Hall To be or not to be – that is not
and the Web
the question. To see or not to see – now that
is the question!
Abhishek
Bhardwaj
Positive James Hannam Will my new tower stand
Polynomials and Sums of Hermitian Squares tall through an earthquake?
Jesse Hart Robin Constants on Algebraic Emma Greenbank Modelling Surtseyan
Curves in C2
Ejecta
Giovanna Le Gros Khovanov Homology Liam McMahon Current Sheet Formation
of Knots
at a Magnetic Neutral Line in a Weakly
Collisional Plasma
Morning Tea
Rachel Fewster How to fake data if you must
Lunch, prizes and farewell
Room 1 Chair Andrea Babylon
Andrus Giraldo
Global Invariant
Manifolds near a Homoclinic Flip Bifurcation
Rebecca Turner Testing a Model of Bird
Navigation
Thursday 20th November
Notes
Title of Talk
Name
Nomination for Best Talk
Note your favourite talk by a student on the voting slip below, tear it oﬀ and post it in the boxes provided
by 11:30am on Thursday 20th November. Plenary talks cannot win the prize. The top four talks will
receive a prize.
Prize Voting Slip