Advanced Mathematics Day 2014
Published on the 22 Sep 2014
The third annual Advanced Mathematics Day was held last Friday 19th September in the Tyree Room, Scientia. Students of the Advanced Mathematics program, plus our Masters and PhD students, attended sessions throughout the day.
The morning session, attended by first and second year students, heard from each of the Heads of Department (Acting Applied Head - Robert Womersley, Pure - Ian Doust, Statistics - Spiro Penev). Former Honours student Nick Fewster delivered a talk on his experience studying Honours at UNSW, and MathSoc President Gary Liang spoke to the students about the Maths Society's activities.
After morning tea, an Honours panel discussion was held for the third and fourth year students. The discussion was led by Honours Coordinators Shane Keating, Catherine Greenhill and Feng Chen, who provided information about Honours projects. Current Honours students Aram Asatryan, Chanduni Wijesinghe and Peter Nguyen answered 
questions about, and provided insights into, their experiences of undertaking Honours. The slides from the panel discussion are available to be downloaded here (PDF). The third-fourth year cohort also listened to an inspiring talk by our alumnus Stephen Broadfoot, who now works at Google on an Android Auto project. The group also heard from Ava Bargi, a current intern at CommBank.
Fourth year student Barton Lee was this year’s recipient of the Advanced Mathematics Honours Scholarship, awarded to him for his exceptional academic performance.
Lunch was attended by a large group of students, several School staff members, and Faculty of Science Dean, Professor Merlin Crossley.
In the afternoon, our Honours, Masters and PhD students listened to a talk by data analytics professionals Alex Slocombe and Marie Siddle from Bluefin Resources. They were then treated to an energetic presentation by Iain Collings, Deputy Chief - Research in CSIRO's Computational Informatics. Nick Fewster spoke again, this time about his experience as a PhD student, and provided practical advice to the attending students. Professor Pierre Del Moral from the School gave an engaging presentation about his research and his impressive academic career.
All student attendees were entered into a prize draw, and three lucky students won Samsung Galaxy tablets.