AMSI-SSAI Lectures #4-5

Yesterday night I gave my AMSI-SSAI public lecture on simulation at the University of Melbourne. Following a seminar in the early afternoon on ABC (essentially the same as in Adelaide and UWS, although I should shorten it). The seminar was well-attended, despite being during the first week of the semester and between classes. I am afraid the lecture did not draw many members of the public, though, which is not a great surprise given my esoteric (?) title, and I am afraid the academics who attended the talk did not really need this basic intro to simulations… I also visited the offices of AMSI on the campus, where I was very warmly welcomed, thank you! This even included an interview with a media officer who happened to be a Physics Honour student at the University of Melbourne, working on a cool radar data analysis. (This Honour program is an interesting entry into research that is missing in the French curriculum, providing students interested in research to spend a year mostly working on a research project right after undergraduate graduation…) In addition, it was an opportunity to look at the great posters made by AMSI to promote math in high schools with the motto “maths make your career count“. Today, I give a seminar at Monash on ABC model choice.

AMSI lecturer

In conjunction with my summer trip down under in July-August, I have been nominated an AMSI-SSAI Lecturer. (AMSI stands for Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute and SSAI for Statistical Society of Australia Inc.) In essence, this means I will travel in several places around Australia to give talks and meet people. This is quite exciting, although I find the prospect of giving a public lecture (as opposed to academic talks) a wee daunting. (Simulation seems like a safe topic, though, as it is hard to fail to find manageable examples. Simulated annealing for sudokus was the first to come to my mind.)