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