UNSW Maths Students have 'Big Day In'

Instead of tidying racks at a department store or pulling beers at the pub this summer, five University of New South Wales mathematics students took the chance to find out what it's like to be a mathematician - and they got paid for it.

They were among 40 vacation scholarship students sponsored by the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics. Students came from 17 different universities that are members of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute.

As a special part of the program, they attended CSIRO's 'Big Day In', where they and other vacation scholars talked about the maths discoveries they had made during their summer research projects. They also heard from a panel of CSIRO scientists about what a science career would offer them.

The students, their research projects and supervisors were as follows:

• Charles Qin, Modern advances in the invariant subspace problem. (Supervisor: Dr Ian Doust)
• Boris Lerner, Wave equations and symmetries in relativity. (Supervisor: Dr Jonathan Kress)
• Xin Lei, Pricing and hedging of game options. (Supervisor: Dr Ben Goldys)
• Si Chun Choi, A rational version of geometric algebra. (Supervisor: A/Prof Norman Wildberger)
• Koushik Panda, Quotient singularities - the invariant rings of finite groups. (Supervisor: Dr Daniel Chan)

Chief of CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, Dr Murray Cameron, said that these bright young people had lots of opportunities to use their talent, with past vacation students going on to great careers in research and business.

"Maths, physics and IT underpin so many technological innovations - cochlear implants, web search tools, and low-emission vehicles to name a few.

"If Australia is going to have world-beating technology and technology-based businesses, we need to nurture people like this", Dr Cameron said.

ICE-EM is funded by the Australian Government through the Department of Education, Science and Training.

For more information contact Nancy Lane, Manager of ICE-EM, at 03 8344 1784 or 0400 196 116,
or any of the UNSW supervisors indicated above.

Vacation Scholar Charles Qin and supervisor Ian Doust	Vacation Scholar Boris Lerner and supervisor Jonathan Kress