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Alright, well, Professor Peter Coaldrake, Professor Terry Speed, Professor Alistair
Fitt, distinguished guests, friends, colleagues and students, welcome to MISG 2014. It's actually
30 years this year since the very first MISG, and about 200 projects and 100 industry partners
later we should be very proud of its achievements, and also of its legacy. Its legacy has been
very fertile ground for developing new relationships between industry and academia. It's also acted
as a training ground for the next generation of Australian and New Zealand industrial and
applied mathematicians and statisticians, and it's also done a lot in lifting the awareness
of the applicability of mathematics and statistics in the broader community. So whether you're
interested in stopping your washing machine from ( ... ) around your laundry floor, or
perhaps optimising battery technology for submarines for the Australian Defence Force,
MISG has done it all and I'm very happy to say that the excellence in industry engagement
is continuing this year. So I'd just like to, before I introduce our first speaker,
I'd just like to make a few very quick acknowledgements; first of all our industry partners and representatives,
we have six great industry projects this year, a feast of applied mathematics and statistics
for us to dine at this week, and I sincerely thank the industry partners, the representatives,
( ... ), we'll get to meet them all up close and personal throughout the day, it's been
an absolute pleasure to this point dealing with these industries and with the representatives,
so welcome to MISG and thank you for your commitment. Also I definitely want to acknowledge
our sponsors, ANZIAM and AMSI, the Australian New Zealand Industrial Applied Mathematics
Division and the Australian Mathematical Society, and of course QUT, this even couldn't happen
without great support from QUT, and particularly I want to acknowledge the support that's come
through the Institute of Future Environments which is housed in this fantastic facility
that we're in today and for the rest of the week, and so I thank Professor Ian Mackinnon,
Professor David Gust for their support of the event. Through the faculty, the Science
and Engineering Faculty, I thank Professor Martin Betts, Chris ( ... ) and Bernie Murchison
for their support in the lead up to this event, and I really look forward to working with
Professor David Siddle in planning the 2015 event so we'll all be back here next year.
And finally the mathematical sciences school, and particularly the head of school, Professor
Ian Turner, he's here, it's your first day back from holidays today so be kind to him,
it's fantastic, the support that Ian gives MISG and myself is very gratefully acknowledged.
Of course there are some other very important people in this room, and that's you; without
the delegates, without the applied mathematicians, statisticians, researchers, academics and
students, MISG can't go forward, and so our challenge this week is to kind of really embrace
the industry projects that we've got, embrace the challenges that they represent, get up
close and meet the industry partners, talk to them, get to know them, they're all very
motivated, very energetic and they're very committed to having mathematics and statistics
help them in their business, so please get in there and meet them. Also just very briefly
I'd just like to acknowledge and thank the project moderators, they're a very important
group of people, we're going to meet each one of the project moderators up close throughout
the rest of the day, but I thank them for, really, their dedication, their hard work
through MISG and the period subsequent to MISG. Okay, so that leads me to the introduction
of the Vice Chancellor of the Queensland University of Technology, Professor Peter Coaldrake AO,
and I know Peter is a fan of applied industrial mathematics, and given the synergies between
MISG and a lot of what QUT stands for and represents, I can think of no better person
to welcome you to QUT, so please welcome Professor Peter Coaldrake.
Thanks Troy. Welcome everyone, I hope you have a very fruitful few days here, it's great
to welcome the MISG back to QUT, Terry was just saying before that this is the second
time that you've been here and we're very pleased to have you back. Troy has already
really talked about the natural alignment, obviously we have a very strong commitment
to the STEM disciplines, obviously we have a very strong commitment as an institution
to the industry alignment of our work, the applied nature of our maths and stats is,
I think, well known, therefore the problem solving potential of math is something that
we're always interested in further exploring, and last but not least we're very interested
in math graduates, the very best math graduates, emerging and being well employed and we obviously
value very strongly the industry partners. I acknowledge, as Troy has done, senior colleagues
who are here in addition to Troy, I thank you and your team for putting this on, to
David Siddle, Ian Mackinnon, David Gust and Ian Turner in particular. So my job is to
welcome you to QUT, but more importantly to introduce our first speaker who is Emeritus
Professor Terry Speed who, as you all know, is the current Prime Ministers Prize winner
for Science, so we're very honoured that Terry is here today. You'll also, many of you, will
know his CV much better than I; he came out of Melbourne, has had a very distinguished
career, he's worked across a number of universities including Berkeley, Melbourne, UWA, Sheffield,
he's also worked for four and a half years during his life at CSIRO. We're very pleased
that you're here this morning Terry, the last time he came to QUT I can't imagine the facilities
in which this particular event would have been held at the time, he might recall, but
I'm rather glad we're holding them here today. Terry Speed.
Ok, so this is me. Well, I got invited to speak here, of course, because of this short-term
notoriety that I've achieved, and I don't think anybody knew that I actually had some
formal connection to the MISG and that's what I'm going to talk about today because I was
sort of involved in the first one, enough to give me a talk anyway. So, you might wonder
where I got my material from, well it was 30 years ago and my memories hopeless, to
be perfectly honest I think I went to the first day, I was certainly involved in a lot
of angst and emotional stuff, which I'll touch on later, associated with our distinguished
guests, but I certainly didn't do the whole week because I'm not an applied mathematician,
but I did find a T-shirt with applied mathematics written on it. I need to thank people, so
that's to say that most of my "recollections" come from this newsletter, and Murray over
here was very kind to scan most of the Division of Mathematics and Statistics newsletters.
So I'm going to give you some background, maybe more than you want but hopefully it
won't be too long and it won't be too boring. You've got to start somewhere, Adam and Eve,
or maybe just Eve. So I'm starting with the first "mathematician" employed by CSIRO in
that capacity. As you can see here, that's a woman named Betty Allan, her real name was
Frances, and she really was a mathematician in the sense that many of you guys are, I
realize there's a mix of traditional applied maths and OR and statistics in this group,
but I'm sure we all feel, roughly speaking, the hardcore MISG is traditional applied maths
and Betty was one of those people, you can see there she did a master's degree on solitary
waves. Anyway, she went over the UK and learned statistics, because around about the time
she was doing her master's a gentleman came from the UK who was head of Rothamsted experimental
station and said "We've got this great guy, Fisher, doing terrific things with agricultural
statistics, you guys ought to get into it." So they sent her off to Cambridge and Rothamsted
to learn the stuff, and she came back and did it. As you see there she worked till 1940,
and we'll have a little audience participation here. Anybody guess what happened in 1940?
Why was her career so short? Murray knows, people from CSIRO excluded here. Maybe women,
perhaps? Older women, perhaps? You know, you couldn't be that old. People who remember
this, when you got married you had to resign from the public service, so that was the end
of her career in 1940, but in fact she continued for several years in an honorary capacity,
both at university and in CSIRO. So the real stuff got going when the men came on the scene,
but just to point out there the first three people in the mathematical world in CSIRO
were women; I've already mentioned Betty Allan, Mildred Barnard and Helen Newton-Turner. Mildred
Barnard also did a master's in applied mathematics of the traditional kind and went to the UK
to work with Fisher. Anyway, in 1940 they actually formed a section called the Section
of Biometrics, and by 1954 it became the division, that's the sort of full status thing in CSIRO,
and this chap here, E.A., known as Alf, Cornish, was the first chief. Of course lots of interesting
things happened which I'm going to pass over, very quickly we've suddenly gotten ourselves
to 1973, but you can see this, and to be honest if you really care about this you could read
stuff about it, there is a couple of articles, several articles about the history of this
period. It starts to look a little bit like MASG after Joe Gani came on the scene, so
as it says there in 1974 he took up the position as Chief and pretty much the first thing he
did, in fact he recommended doing it even before he came, it's one of these situations
where you ask somebody to review an organization, they write a review, then you look for someone
to implement the review and surprise, the only person who could do it is the person
that wrote the review. So ( .... ) "Will you come implement that review?", that's what
happened. Well, he just renamed 'Division of Mathematical Statistics', very conveniently,
'Division of Mathematics and Statistics' and started to populate the division with hardcore
applied mathematicians, such as some of you people here. And I've mentioned some names
here, John Blake who was the very, excuse me, this is what I got here, John Blake and
John Knight were the early appointments and some others, including Bob Anderssen who is
sitting here now. I meant to begin by asking: How many people other than the two I already
know, Bob and their folks were actually at the first MISG? We've got two starters, any
others? Three? You think? I feel exactly the same way, I think I was too. Alright, so we're
up to three, so if you want to get the truth on all this, don't ask him. But I'm sure Neville
and Bob have much better memories. Anyway, so just getting back to our weak narrative
here, we've got applied mathematics within CSIRO and in 1981 a very interesting joint
venture occurred, a company called Siromath was created, and as you see there it's a joint
venture with an accountancy firm, ES Knight, AMDEL, that's the Australian Mineral Development
Corporation, and Price Waterhouse who you know about because they still exist with Cooper.
And so this company was basically to be, well, to do things a little bit like what you guys
are doing: get out there and help everybody. It wasn't just statistics, the applied mathematicians
got into it as well. That's relevant because CSIRO Division of Mathematics and Statistics
and Siromath were the joint sponsors of the first MISG. So just a few words about DMS
applied mathematics, John Blake, as it says here, was the first in the sense that he was
within the division, I hasten to add there were many real applied mathematicians in other
division, in fact lots; it was almost as if the Division of Mathematics and Statistics
had a minority. As you see there around 60 mathematicians from 15 divisions met in two
meeting in '77 and '78, and in the second one one of the guests was from the United
Kingdom from Oxford University, John Ockendon, Professor John Ockendon, and he had been running
mathematics in industry study groups, in the UK, for close to 10 years by the time he came
out to that meeting at CSIRO, so it's not a big surprise that one of the recommendations
of that meeting was that they set up mathematics in industry study groups. But notice the date,
that's 1978; the first one was 1984, so it actually took 6 years to get this idea to
fruition. And along the way we had to have a report on mathematical sciences in Australia,
and a recommendation that they do that very thing. This information was taken from an
article by Bob Anderssen on the history of the rationale for a mathematics in industry
study group, and he points out there that the 1981 review of the mathematical sciences
in Australia did recommend that. You can read more, but Bob's inspirational writings on
the role of mathematics are legendary and one of the remarks that I like that he quoted
from Ed David, who wrote a famous report around about the same time, was this wonderful thing
here: "The importance of mathematics is not self-evident". I'm going to just touch on
that a bit more. Noel Barton has his own rationale, as I'll explain in a second, Noel was the
first co-director, the co-director of the first MISG, his rationale was that there were
problems with applied mathematics in Australia. In an article he quoted something that I found
quite interesting, there was a meeting of the Applied Mathematics Section of the Australian
Maths Society that year, and there was a very large number of presentations, and Noel and
a colleague estimated that approximately 10% of those presentations were about real problems;
the rest were about solving equations, numerical analysis, and all the other things mathematicians
like to do when they're not coming to terms with real problems. And Noel predicted that
we needed to do something about it, he observed that there were very few, that particular
meeting that I mentioned in 1984, I think there were three people, well there were three
people at that time in the section from industry. And he ended with this stirring remark that
"It is now time for the Division to become bold, vigorous and entrepreneurial", which
is you know Noel describes him totally, "...and to forge industrial and community contacts.
If this is not done, the Division will remain a club for academics and institutional scientists,
and applied mathematicians in Australia will wither away." Well that, perhaps, is a little
overdramatic, it's not entirely clear that it would have withered away without the MISG
but it didn't anyway so we don't have to worry about that too much. I do want to make a plug
for another inspirational figure at that time. Barry Jones, who I'm sure many of you still
remember from that time, and younger people have probably heard of this strange man who,
from time to time, makes public announcements of gets on TV shows, he was the Minister of
Science at that time and, I would say, roughly speaking, never since that time, and certainly
never, before was there such an engaged Minister of Science, and he tried to wake Australia
up, I mean one of his many books is a memorable one called 'Sleepers, Wake!', and I have very
bad memory of most of that time but shuffling into Barry's office and saying to him "We're
mathematicians and we'd like you to help us get a higher profile" or something like that,
Bob Anderssen will be able to give a more nuanced version of that meeting, I remember
Barry saying, and I don't think it was my head, but he tapped somebody on the head and
he said "You want me to say "See this guy? He is a mathematician. He's important. Remember
that."" and I went "Oh, hmmm, yeah", that seemed to be pushing the responsibility, it
was clear that he was not going to do that, he was wanting us to show that it was important
and I think that was an important message at that time. It was also a message from Ed
David and from others, so just mentioned that one there, Noel Barton referred to an inspirational
speech by Barry Jones at their 1984 meeting of the Applied Mathematics Section where he
said "Australian scientists are a hopeless lot of wimps at presenting their case", of
course the question is whether this applies now. And David mentioned the same thing "If
you want to get mathematics appreciated by the community, you don't persuade the community
to appreciate you; you convince them why you need appreciating". Alright, so we've got
to the actual study group now, 1984, co-directors Kerry Landman on the left and Noel Barton
on the right, Kerry was an employee of Siromath at that time and Noel was within the Division
of Mathematics and Statistics. By now Joe Gani had finished his term and I was the chief
of the show and these guys, at least Noel, was working in our division. The stars of
the show, in some sense, were the Ockendons, Hilary and John Ockendon. As I already mentioned,
John had been out in 1978 and had been running successful oxford study groups for many years.
At this point I should give you a lot of, you know, secret inside stories, gossip, interesting
things, let's just say these of course are not contemporary photos, it was quite hard
for me to find contemporary photos of Hilary and John so just roll that back 30 years,
make the grey hair and the bald patch, populate it with darker hair and you'll get a bit what
they look. Hilary was absolutely charming; John was what sometimes people call difficult,
he had opinions, very strong ones, it was a lot of interesting events. Kerry Landman
reminded me that on one occasion when they sat around trying to decide on the problems
to present for the study group, he didn't get what he wanted so he just stormed out
of the room and left them to go on without him. He was an inspirational but difficult
person. Anyway, a few statistics or facts about the study group. The Ockendons came
for five months, serious resources went into getting this one going. There was, of course,
a lot of help from the University of Melbourne, it was held in Auburn College at the University
of Melbourne. A lot of DMS staff, Division of Mathematics and Statistics staff were involved.
There were 109 delegates, which I'm guessing is slightly fewer, but not dramatically so,
than the number here now, and I guess always at these things the breakup of academia versus
places like CSIRO versus real industry is of interest, and you can see there a bit under
20 percent came from industry, and there were lectures on topics that were thought to be
of interest to the industry people and others. Okay, so I'm just going to show you the problems
then I'm pretty much done. As you can see they are all serious, hardcore applied mathematics;
a couple from the steel industry, a couple from the sugar industry, the aluminium industry,
electricity transmission, I do remember sitting through the first day and thinking "There
is no point in me sitting through the rest of this, I'm a statistician and this is serious
stuff." I believe that there was real success on a couple of those problems which helps,
and I think that's the sort of thing you want every year at this mathematics in industry
study group, you want a couple of real success stories, some of them, I noticed at least
one of the problems this year was around last year, so some of them don't quite get knocked
on the head the first time but nothing like a bit of real success where you can claim
you saved somebody millions of dollars, and it might even be true, but it's great for
publicity for mathematics. Okay, since then this is a quick review of the places that
it's been held because strangely enough I could not find one place that listed all of
them, different websites go back different periods, but hint hint to somebody from the
Australian Maths Society that it might be good to have the whole history of the MISG
there. Just a few concluding remarks, I feel all of this is superfluous now, I was embarrassed
to put it here because it sounds like I'm patting myself on the back, but Troy said
all these fine things already so I don't really have to think of it like that. I do think
that Australian mathematics benefitted from the MISG, giving experience in problems, giving
the sort of thing that you're going to do this week which is a pretty hard experience
to get in a normal academic environment, it's still going after 30 years, that's a pretty
good sign, well, we think it might have achieved some reasonable goals and, as I say, I'm not
claiming credit for this but I was encouraged to put it in by other people, not by me, that
building bridges to industry, identifying new fields and, of course, influencing the
work in CSIRO because up until then most of the mathematicians in CSIRO worked with other
parts of CSIRO and not with the industry that is the I in CSIRO, so it definitely shifted
that balance. And finally, you have six new interesting projects, have a good week. Thank
you very much. Thank you Terry, thank you very much to both
Peter and to Terry for the opening remarks, I know how much that historical perspective
of where we've been and how we've got here, how much that will resonate with people in
this audience, people that are very passionate about industrial applied mathematics in this
country and in New Zealand (24:14), so thank you very much for being with us, I appreciate
it. Well that's the official bit done, so the bit that comes now is morning tea, so
you'll be able to meet our industry partners, morning tea will be just out where the registration
was, if I could just ask that the industry partners and the moderators, as well as our
two invited speakers this morning, if they could just hang back, we'd just like to grab
a group photo if that's possible before you have to dash off. Thanks very much, we start
back here in about half an hour and we'll start then discussing in detail those industry
projects, so thank you very much.