Mathematicians recognised by the Australian Mathematical Society
The Australian Mathematical Society (AustMS) has awarded Professor Peter Taylor its highest honour, the George Szekeres Medal, and Dr Nicholas Beaton, Professor Jan De Gier, and Professor Tony Guttmann were awarded the prize for best paper.
Professor Taylor is a globally respected stochastic modelling researcher, and is known for the contributions he’s made to the fields of applied probability and operations research. As well as being a professor at the University of Melbourne, he is the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS).
In honouring Peter, AustMS cited his many contributions to a variety of different areas. Those include the control of telecommunications systems and data networks, the management of natural resources, mechanism design in economics, the calculation of the probabilities of extreme rainfall and bushfire events, understanding patient flow in healthcare systems and new `disruptive technologies' such as blockchains. He has also maintained a passion, which continues to this day, in understanding the behaviour of queues.
University of Melbourne researchers Dr Beaton, Professor De Gier and Professor Guttman were awarded the Gavin Brown Prize, along with Mireille Bousquet-Mélou from the Université de Bordeaux in France and Hugo Duminil-Copin from the Université de Genève in Switzerland, for a paper titled “The Critical Fugacity for Surface Adsorption of Self-Avoiding Walks on the Honeycomb Lattice is 1 + √2”, that was published in the prestigious journal Communications in Mathematical Physics.
The prize for a paper published in the years 2008-2016 is named after Gavin Brown, an influential mathematician who went on to serve as Vice-Chancellor of The University of Sydney from 1996-2008.