*with details kindly sent by Barbara Keyfitz
The New Zealand Mathematical Society (ZMS), Australian Mathematical Society (AustMS) and American Mathematical Society (AMS) held a joint meeting in Auckland, New Zealand, December 9-13, 2024. The AMS is a member society of ICIAM; in addition, there was a considerable presence of applied mathematics, including two ICIAM officers (Yvonne Stokes and Kenji Kajiwara) who spoke in special sessions, and a full session on “Industrial Mathematics”; co-organized by Steve Taylor (University of Auckland), Melanie Roberts (Griffiths University, Australia) and Barbara Keyfitz, former Chair of the Dianoia Editorial Board Committee and Professor of Mathematics at Ohio State University.
“By any measure, the meeting was a resounding success, exceeding the organizers expectations of attendance by over 50% (over 650 registrants rather than the 400 anticipated). It was the largest mathematics meeting ever to have taken place in Auckland. The presidents and many officers of all three societies were there” said Barbara.
According to her, registration and teas were in a spacious conference building with a lovely outdoor terrace (remember that early December is the eve of summer in the southern hemisphere). “There were 31 Special Sessions and two contributed paper sessions, most of them multi-part sessions extending over all five days of the conference. Even though university classes were not in session, we appear to have taxed the classroom capacity of the university, or at least of the part of it within a short walk from the registration area. Our “Industrial Mathematics” session met in an engineering student laboratory; a little odd, but perhaps appropriate for our topic. Navigating around the campus and finding interesting sessions was helped by the meeting’s complete and well-organized web page, where you can find all the sessions, their speakers and abstracts”.
There were ten plenary talks (also listed with speakers’ names and abstracts on the conference web page), and many of them centered on topics of interest to applied mathematicians. “My (admittedly subjective) list of keywords and speakers includes hyperbolic polynomials (James Saunderson), pattern formation (Priya Subramanian), persistent homology (Katherine Turner), solitaire (Persi Diaconis), statistical mechanics (Richard Kenyon), neural networks (Geordie Williamson), modelling persistence of languages with few speakers (Maori in this case, presented by Rachel Ka’ai-Mahuta and Michael Miller), and modeling quantum semiconductors (Svitlana Mayboroda); with apologies for this very rough summary of topics”, completed Barbara.
