Awards

Every year the NZMS hands out awards for mathematics research and contributions to mathematics in NZ.

Aitken Prize

The 2024 Aitken Prize was awarded to David Groothuizen Dijkema

The Aitken Prize is awarded for the best contributed talk by a student at the annual New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium.
David Dijkema with NZMS president Melissa Tacy

The Aitken Prize is named in honour of the New Zealand born mathematician Alexander Craig Aitken. The Prize was first offered at the 1995 Colloquium held in conjunction with the Aitken Centenary Conference at the University of Otago. Candidates for the Prize give a talk on a topic in any branch of the mathematical sciences.

Eligibility. To be eligible, a candidate must be enrolled (or have been enrolled) for a degree in Mathematics at a university or other tertiary institution in New Zealand in the year of the award. Candidates should indicate their willingness to be considered for the Prize on the Colloquium registration form.

A judging panel is appointed by the NZMS President. The panel makes recommendations to the President for the Prize. Normally the Prize will be awarded to one person, but in exceptional circumstances the Prize may be shared, or no prize may be awarded.

The prize consists of NZ$500 paid into the recipient’s bank account, accompanied by a certificate.

The 2024 Aitken Prize was awarded to David Groothuizen Dijkema (University of Auckland) for the talk “Analysing dynamics near heteroclinic networks with a projected map”.

Ellen Hammatt (Victoria University of Wellington) and Davide Papapicco (University of Auckland) earned honorable mentions for their talks.

 

Recipients of the Aitken Prize
Year Name Location Award Details
2023 Juan Patino-Echeverria Auckland Transitions to wild chaos in a 4D Lorenz-like system
2022 Emma Hogan Canterbury The intersection of bicircular and lattice path matroids
2022 Pedro Rossetto Otago Magnetically confined mountains on neutron stars
2021 No award
2020 Pedro Henrique Barboza Rossetto Otago Chaos in Plane Fronted Gravitational Waves
2019 Martin Bachraty Auckland Skew morphisms of finite groups
2018 Pascal Eun Sig Cheon Auckland Notions of transfinite diameter on affine algebraic varieties
2017 Jesse Hart Auckland Notions of transfinite diameter on affine algebraic varieties
2016 Naomi Gendler Auckland Pulse Dynamics of Fibre Lasers with Saturable Absorbers
2015 Andrew Keane Auckland Bifurcation analysis of a model for the El Niño Southern Oscillation
2014 Timm Treskatis Canterbury Accelerated gradient vs. primal-dual methods in nonsmooth optimisation
2013 Chris Stevens Otago The Friedrich-Nagy gauge for colliding plane gravitational waves
2013 Timm Treskatis Canterbury Trust-region SQP methods for numerical simulations of viscoplastic flows
2012 Stefanie Hittmeyer Auckland Untangling Wild Chaos
2012 Jennifer Creaser Auckland The Lorenz System Near the Loss of the Foliation Condition
2011 Edoardo Persichetti Auckland Coding theory and cryptography: New perspectives
2010 Rachael Tappenden Canterbury Extensions of compressed sensors
2009 Michael Smith Auckland Vibration of floating and submerged elastic plates
2009 Shannon Ezzat Canterbury Representation growth of the Heisenberg group over quadratic integers
2008 Mareike Fischer Canterbury Curious properties of Maximum Parsimony in estimating evolutionary trees and ancestral sequence states
2007 Peter Humphries Canterbury A basis exchange property for matroids
2007 Ratneesh Suri Massey A real options approach to fisheries
2006 Kevin Byard Massey Applications of qualified residue difference sets
2005 Amanda Elvin Massey The role of gap junctions in a neural field model
2005 Elan Gin Auckland Calcium waves and buffers
2004 Joanne Mann Massey To vaccinate or not to vaccinate?
2003 Cynthia Wang Massey Modelling a plate of arbitrary shape in infinitely deep water using a higher order method
2002 Sivajah Somasundaram Waikato Some recent results concerning weak Asplund spaces
2001 Brian van Dam Auckland The construction method of resolutions and Dowker spaces
2000 Patrick Rynhart Massey Static liquid bridges
2000 Barbara Holland Massey Median networks: A visual representation of ancient Adelie penguin DNA
2000 Sivajah Somasundaram Waikato Cover semi-complete topological groups
1999 Britta Basse Canterbury Mathematical modelling for conservation: predator control via secondary poisoning
1999 Jamie Sneddon Auckland Domination conditions for tournaments
1998 Charles Semple Victoria Excluded minors for matroid representability
1997 Robyn Curtis Auckland Subgraphs of hypercubes with no small cycles
1997 Louise Parsons Auckland
1996 Anton Raviraj Massey Gauss's equation and Backlund transformations
1996 Thomasin Smith Massey On arithmetic degree theory
1995 Chris Stephens Canterbury Global optimisation requires global information