News Archive

Just two little numbers have changed the way our world operates.

The binary code, on which all computer systems are based, uses the digits 0 and 1. Although the digital age is built on just two numbers, it needs people with a strong mathematics background to work in it and develop it.

The University has pronounced 2011 the Year of Mathematics at UWA, to celebrate maths and the powerful role it plays in our everyday lives. Among the events, some of the world's top mathematicians are attending a two-day mathematics workshop .

Winthrop Professor Helen Wildy, Dean of Education, said the year and its activities would be a reminder that never before have we had such an urgent need for more mathematics teachers.

“We need them to inspire a new generation of graduates with skills in maths and statistics,” Professor Wildy said.

ARC Federation Fellow and current WA Scientist of the Year, mathematician Winthrop Professor Cheryl Praeger, said many disciplines such as physics and economics had always relied on a foundation of mathematics.

“But now virtually every area of our lives depends on the mathematical sciences – from healthcare to telecommun-ications; from understanding climate change to making secure financial transactions,” she said.

“We need to ensure a strong mathematical education for our young people to underpin their other skills, whether in science, medicine, engineering or technology.”

Professor Praeger, one of the most highly-cited mathematicians in the world, is already doing her bit to enthuse school students about maths. She has just run the 13th annual WA Junior Mathematics Olympiad (WAJO), which attracted 325 Year 8 and 9 students from more than 45 schools to UWA on a Saturday morning to take part in a maths competition.

WAJO is a state initiative run by the WA branch of the Australian Olympiad Committee, which Professor Praeger chairs.

"It leads to more enrichment and challenge for young students who are interested in maths, and that leads onto the Mathematics Olympiad,” she said. “This year, four of the 25 high school students who go to Melbourne in December for maths enrichment training prior to choosing Australia’s Olympiad team, are from WA. We often have nobody representing our state, or perhaps one or two.”

Professor Praeger and the WA director of the Australian Mathematics Olympiad Committee, Greg Gamble, have been working hard with bright young mathematicians.

“WAJO this year was just brilliant. it was great to see the kids enjoying it so much.”

After the WA Minister for Education, Elizabeth Constable, presented the prizes at WAJO, she announced that the State Government would sponsor two prizes for excellence in mathematics teaching, at primary and high school level.

“There are no details yet, but fantastic, inspiring maths teachers are certainly what we need in schools, because fewer and fewer students are choosing to study advanced mathematics,” Professor Praeger said.

“It’s affecting their progress in courses such as engineering, physics, computer science and other sciences. We have to teach new undergraduate students the maths we wish they had studied in high school. By not doing advanced maths at school, these students are making life hard for themselves, because the way things are taught at university is at a much quicker pace than the way they are taught at school.

“It comes as a shock to the students when they realise how fast they are expected to learn at university level and, without a strong grounding in school maths, many of them don’t have the fundamentals to build on.”

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alan Robson, has mooted the idea of offering a bonus to prospective university students if they studied advanced maths at school. The scheme would be similar to the bonus that ramps up the tertiary entrance score, by 10 per cent, of students who have studied (and sat the final exams in) a foreign language at high school.

The maths bonus may be introduced in coming years.

“I like the idea but I would prefer to go back to making advanced maths a prerequisite for engineering and science courses,” Professor Praeger said. “Not all schools teach advanced maths, so, in the interests of equity and access, we didn’t push it as a prerequisite. But there’s the risk that fewer and fewer schools will teach it.”

Professor Praeger is the first Australian to be elected to the executive of the International Mathematics Union (IMU – the body that awards the prestigious fields medal every four years, for outstanding discoveries by young mathematicians).

For the first time, the IMU executive is meeting in Australia next year and Professor Praeger will host the 10 members from Europe, Asia and the Americas at UWA in February. A maths symposium, MathWest, will celebrate the IMU executive’s first foray into australia, and will be part of UWA’s Year of Mathematics.

One objective of the symposium is to get mathematics onto the political agenda in a bid to enhance the future of maths education. A series of lectures, a maths and industry breakfast and a proposed school visit will be part of the itinerary for the IMU.

The union’s secretary, Professor Martin Grotschell from the Technical University of Berlin, will meet industry leaders and discuss the relationship between mathematics and modern industry.

Later, it is planned that he will talk to school children about the invisible mathematics that is behind many everyday objects and how it drives modern technology.

Later in the year, UWA graduate Akshay Venkatesh will visit his alma mater as Professor-at-Large with the Institute of Advanced Studies and as part of the Year of Mathematics. The brilliant young mathematician is Professor-at-Large in Mathematics at Stanford University.

If anybody can encourage young people to study maths, Professor Venkatesh is surely one of them. He is the only australian to have won medals at both the International Physics Olympiad and the International Mathematics Olympiad, at the age of 12.

Soon after, before his 13th birthday, he enrolled at UWA and, by the age of 16, had completed first class Honours in pure mathematics and won a Hackett Scholarship to do his PhD at Princeton.

He was an undergraduate classmate of Associate Professor Michael Giudici (who also won a Hackett Scholarship for his PhD). A/Professor Giudici is an Australian Research Fellow in UWA’s Centre for Mathematics of Symmetry and Computation, a specialisation he shares with Professor Praeger.

In a beautifully symmetric move by the Australian Mathematics Trust, Professor Praeger has been chosen as one of two winners of the BH Neumann award this year, in the lead-up to the Year of Mathematics and the historic IMU executive visit.

The award, named after Professor Bernard Neumann (who came to Australia in 1962 and provided stellar leadership in mathematics teaching), is for important contributions over many years to the enrichment of mathematics learning in Australia and its regions.

As well as her highly-cited research in algebra and discrete mathematics, Professor Praeger has taken a leading role in the teaching of mathematics.

Professor Neumann held an honorary doctorate from UWA. And to round off the symmetry, his son Peter was Professor Praeger’s PhD supervisor at Oxford.