We celebrate Ian Sloan's 80th birthday
Published on the 26 Jun 2018
On June 2018 we held a conference at UNSW to celebrate Professor Ian Sloan’s 80th birthday.
The conference was kicked off on Sunday 17 June with a lively birthday dinner at the Palais Room in Luna Park, which was attended by 112 people, including several of Ian’s family members.
On Monday 18 June Ian was awarded an Honorary Degree, "Doctor of the University", at UNSW’s Clancy Auditorium. The scientific part of the conference commenced that afternoon in Colombo Theatres, with an official opening by Faculty of Science Dean Professor Emma Johnston and a welcome by Professor Bruce Henry. Presentations were delivered by 14 speakers across Monday and Tuesday (*speakers listed below).
The conference’s international participants hailed from Austria, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Poland, South Korea, the U.K., and the U.S. - demonstrating the breadth and strength of Ian's collaboration and influence in the global mathematical community.
As a tribute to Ian, a festschrift titled "Contemporary Computational Mathematics - A Celebration of the 80th Birthday of Ian Sloan" was published by Springer. It comprises nearly 60 articles written by international leaders in a diverse range of areas in computational mathematics. The book also tells the life story of Ian - the renowned mathematician, family man, colleague and friend, who has been an inspiration to many.
As a satellite event of this UNSW conference, there was a two-week research program titled "On the Frontiers of High Dimensional Computation" from 4 -15 June at the MATRIX research institute in Creswick, Victoria, where 42 researchers from Australia and overseas gathered for informal collaboration and a workshop covering many interesting topics.
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*Speakers: Conference in Honour of Ian Sloan on the Occasion of His 80th birthday, UNSW Sydney:
Mark Ainsworth (Brown University, USA)
Douglas Arnold (University of Minnesota, USA)
Ronald Cools (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Mike Giles (University of Oxford, UK)
Ivan Graham (University of Bath, UK)
Tony Guttmann (University of Melbourne)
Markus Hegland (ANU, Australia)
Fred Hickernell (IIT Chicago, USA)
Nalini Joshi (University of Sydney)
Linda Petzold (UCSB, USA)
Edward Redish (University of Maryland, USA)
James Sethian (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Wolfgang Wendland (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Henryk Wozniakowski (Columbia University, USA & University of Warsaw, Poland)
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Thank you to the organisers who ensured that the conference and dinner were a success and will be remembered for many years to come:
Josef Dick; Frances Kuo (Chair); Quoc Thong Le Gia; William McLean; Suzie Scandurra; Kaye Sedgers; Thanh Tran; Robert Womersley.