Citation statistics

There is an interesting new report “Citation statistics“, jointly produced by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), on the use and abuse of various citation statistics (such as impact factors and h-indices) as proxies for research quality.  (One of the authors, [...]

2009 / 2010 Fulbright CSIRO Postgraduate Scholarship to Australia

[This announcement was forwarded to me from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission, who supported me as a Fulbright scholar for my post-graduate study at Princeton. I recommend the Fulbright programs, especially for students who plan to maintain close ties to their home country while also enjoying the benefits of studying abroad. - T.] A partnership of [...]

Mathematics at Flinders

In the last two decades at Australian universities, departments have primarily been funded using formulae that are based to a large extent on the number of Australian and foreign students that are enrolled in their majors, or are taught by their service courses. As such, there is a tremendous pressure on administrations and departments to [...]

Mathematics Ashes

The Australian and UK mathematics trusts have set up a “Mathematics Ashes“, in analogy with the well-known cricketing counterpart, for the Australian and British IMO teams to compete for each year, as part of their planned joint training sessions, thus injecting the traditional Aussie values of sport and rivalry with the Poms into the competition. [...]

Maths in the UK

Student numbers are consistently drifting from high- to medium-level mathematics courses, and migrating from there to the lowest level.  The nation needs mathematics, and mathematicians, to keep up with its traditional commercial rivals, and also with newer competitors such as China and India; yet the mathematics economy is losing out.  It’s cool to drop out [...]

Queen’s birthday honours

The Australian Queen’s birthday honours list for 2008, announced this week, includes two honours for contributions to mathematics and mathematical education.  Ian Sloan has been appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) For service to education through the study of mathematics, particularly in the field of computational mathematics, as an academic, researcher and [...]

Put a little science in your life

There is an excellent op-ed piece by Brian Greene in the New York Times today entitled “Put a little science in your life“. It discusses the importance of science, not only in addressing the modern world’s challenges, but also in empowering individuals with a means of understanding the world around them. By a random coincidence, [...]

Australian Olympiad Teams 2008

The Australian teams for the 2008 International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI) and in Mathematics (IMO), which will be held in August in Cairo, Egypt and in July in Madrid, Spain respectively, were formally announced on Thursday at Parliament House in Canberra. Some statistics for Australia’s IMO performance over the years – it started competing in [...]

Relative Funding Model and Mathematics in Australian Universities

In 1989, the federal government placed colleges of advanced education in the same funding basket as the 19 pre-existing universities, forming a “unified national system” (UNS). During that year, a sample of universities provided 1988 data on the actual costs of running bachelor and postgraduate degree programs in various disciplines. From this, there arose a [...]