Jalal Karam, who finished a M.Sc. in our department with Karl Dilcher in 1995 and later received his Ph.D. in Engineering Mathematics at TUNS, now holds an Assistant Professor position at the Arab Open University in Beirut, Lebanon. He teaches in the Faculty of Information Technology and Computing of this university, which has affiliation with the Open University in Britain. Jalal returned to Lebanon in 2001, and he recently got married.

Students of our department were very successful in two undergraduate competitions this past year. In the APICS Mathematics Competition, which was held at UPEI in October, our two teams won both first and second prize. The teams consisted of Jana Archibald & Micah McCurdy and Michael Lawrence & Steven Noble, respectively.

The following appointees joined the department on July 1, 2003.

(1) Joe Bielawski, Assistant Professor, probationary tenure track appointment in Biology (75%) and Statistics (25%).

(2) Michael Dowd, Assistant Professor, probationary tenure track appointment in Statistics.

(3) Roman Smirnov, Assistant Professor, probationary tenure track appointment in Mathematics.

David Iron has been appointed to a probationary tenure track appointment in Mathematics at the rank of Assistant Professor effective July 1, 2004.

Sigbjorn Hervik and Gabor Lukacs, have been appointed Killam Post-Doctoral Fellows in the Department.

Hervik joined the department January 1, 2004.

Lukacs will arrive in January 2005.

Mitja Mastnak has just been awarded an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship for the next two years.

Jeannette Janssen was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, with tenure effective July 1, 2003.

Ed Susko was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, with tenure effective July 1, 2003.

Ray Spiteri was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, with tenure effective July 1, 2004.

Robert Milson was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, with tenure effective July 1, 2004.

Paul Hines has been reappointed as Adjunct Professor for the period July 1, 2004 - June 30, 2009.

Retiring from the Faculty this year is Luzius Grünenfelder (Mathematics and Statistics). We wish him all the best and hope he will be a permanent visitor to the department.

Congratulations to Karl Dilcher, for winning the "Srini" Award for excellence in teaching and for dedication to students in Computer Science 2003.

Congratulations to Ray Spiteri and Lisa Kalynchuk on the birth of their daughter Sophia, during the big blizzard.

High School Science and Engineering Week (HSSEW) is a program hosted by the Faculties of Science and Engineering and is held each summer during the month of August. This summer's program will be held from August 23-27. Forty grade eleven students from various Nova Scotia high schools are invited to participate. The aim of the program is to introduce students to some aspects of Science and Engineering at Dalhousie University. The program is meant to be more fun than it is demanding and, as such, students require no prior preparation or study. Participants get a sampling of Dalhousie University's offerings, and it is our hope that these students will later choose to study at Dalhousie.

Richard Wood - sabbatical leave 01 Jan 05 - 3 Jun 05.

John Clements - sabbatical leave 1 Jan 05 to 31 Dec 05.

Karl Dilcher - sabbatical leave 1 July 04 to 31 Dec. 04

Bruce Smith - sabbatical leave 1 Jan 05 to 30 June 05

Ed Susko - sabbatical leave 1 July 04 - 31 Dec. 04

Dick Sutherland - sabbatical leave 1 Jan 05 - 30 June 05

Kok-Keong Tan - sabbatical leave 1 Jan 05 - 31 Dec. 05

I. Heydar Radjavi was Visiting Professor at the University of Waterloo from January to April 2004. He writes:

II. A. C. Thompson made two trips overseas in the early part of this year. The first to Oberwolfach in early January and the second to Nanjing in April. He writes: Oberwolfach refers to the Mathematical Research Institute located just outside the village of that name in the Black Forest region of Germany. The Institute has a programme of

III. Jonathan Borwein FRSC returned to Dalhousie University and joined the Faculty of Computing Science as Research Chair with a cross-appointment in Mathematics.

(a) Jonathan M. Borwein was Shrum Professor of Science (1993- 2004) and a Canada Research Chair in Information

Technology (2001-04) at Simon Fraser University, where he was founding Director of the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics. In 2004, he (re-) joined the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie as a Research Chair in Distributed and Collaborative Research, with a cross-appointment in Mathematics, while preserving an adjunct appointment at Simon Fraser. He is delighted to be back. He was born in St Andrews in 1951, and received his DPhil from Oxford in 1974, as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to joining SFU in 1993, he worked at Dalhousie (1974-91), Carnegie-Mellon (1980-82) and Waterloo (1991-93). He has received various awards including the Chauvenet Prize (93), Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada (94), Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (02), an honorary degree from Limoges (99), and foreign membership in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (03). John is a past President of the Canadian Mathematical Society (2000-02) and past Chair of (the National Science Library) NRC-CISTI's Advisory Board. He chairs the International Math Union's committee on electronic information and communications (www.ceic.math.ca, 2002-2006). His interests span pure (analysis), applied (optimization), computational (numerical and computational analysis) mathematics, and high performance computing. He has authored ten books (most recently two on Experimental Mathematics www.expmath.info) and over 250 journal articles, and is co-founder (1994) of a Halifax software company, MathResources (www.mathresources.com), producing interactive CD and Web tools for school and university mathematics.

(b) He describes his new lab as follows:

Dalhousie Drive Based on experience gained within the Simon Fraser CoLab, and in conjunction with a wide variety of academic and corporate partners, this project is to develop a laboratory, the Dalhousie Distributed Research Institute and Virtual Environment (D-DRIVE, www.cs.dal.ca/ddrive), to support an "advanced collaborative environment" where display technologies, next generation input technologies, and wireless networking combine to enable highly collaborative and distributed real-time interactions to take place. The use of such technologies also permits the easy meshing of high-performance computing into research interactions.

It is intended that the core use of the space will be on highly mathematical and scientific tasks, for example, research collaborations between university faculty, research collaborations between universities and industry, and research analysis of mentoring and teaching interactions within and between universities and schools. Necessary mathematical OCR tools and software will be acquired.

One central feature of the laboratory will be large (greater than 50 inch diagonal size) tiled multi-touch sensitive, high resolution display panels that permit users and researchers to interact directly with the panels rather than through the usual keyboard or mouse. In addition, there will be a variety of stereo visualization devices and multicast AccessGrid capacity for computing and grid collaboration. A proportion of the budget is earmarked for a refresh of equipment in this rapidly changing period. An Apple G5 computer cluster and a file server will be installed to explore cost effective computation and to serve visualizations to remote sites.

Wireless will be installed to permit laptops and other devices to be integrated dynamically into the room so that those devices become an integral part of the environment. Corresponding networking components will be installed to permit additional devices such as cell phones, pagers, and hand-held organizers to be integrated into the environment, or used remotely.

Various other input and output devices will be installed. Additionally, the laboratory will contain various pieces of video equipment so that the use of the facility may be captured and studied. This will also allow for production of video output to aid dissemination of research findings and to enhance distance collaboration and distributed visualization D-DRIVE will be housed at Dalhousie University within the Computer Science Building-initially in roughly 625 square feet. Since there are no commercial, off-the-shelf, options for most such highly collaborative software, a certain amount of the software will have to be written to enable the level of integration required of the infrastructure.

IV. Keith Taylor joined as the Dean of the Faculty of Science and Professor of Mathematics in July 2003. He writes:

Alan Welsh from the University of Southampton visited for 10 days at the end of September 2003 to work with Chris Field.

Ed Susko, Chris Field and Hong Gu of the Statistics Division are very active members of an interdisciplinary research group funded by Genome Atlantic. The group is focused on molecular evolution, phylogenetics and genomics. They are working with the molecular biologist, Andrew Roger and computer scientist, Christian Blouin along with their research teams on important questions in early eukaryote evolution with particular interest in lateral gene transfer and protein evolution. In their research, they build appropriate statistical models for molecular evolution and develop computational methods for maximum likelihood estimation and inference. The methods are computationally intensive and require carefully constructed algorithms for realistic data sets. Joe Bielawski, who is cross-appointed between Biology and Statistics, joined the team this August as part of the Genome Atlantic project. Three statistics graduate students, Xiaofei Shi, Krista Collins and Liwen Zou are all funded by Genome Atlantic.

They are currently in the process of developing a graduate programme in computational biology and bioinformatics involving researchers from Statistics, Biology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Computer Science.

In December 2003 Jin Yue began working under Roman Smirnov's supervision on his PhD thesis. In February 2004 he won a Killam Scholarship (it was renewed). He is currently working on two papers "Covariants, joint invariants and the equivalence problem in the invariant theory of Killing tensors" (a joint work with R. Smirnov) and "The 1856 lemma of Cayley revisited".

In the ten years since Chebucto Community Net's founding in June 1994, thousands of people and hundreds of community groups and other organizations have gone online with Chebucto. The internet itself has grown and changed, not always for the best.

Back in 1994, most people were becoming aware of the internet but weren't entirely sure what it was or what it could offer them. Internet access was rare and the general lack of knowledge about it threatened to leave most people unable to take advantage of the many opportunities it offered. A visionary group of individuals pulled from the public library system and the then Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computing Science decided that something needed to be done about this. Their efforts led to the forming of a group from which would come both the Chebucto Community Net Society and the N.S. Provincial Community Access Program.

Both groups shared - and still share today - the goal of promoting community involvement in the online community and the utilizing of online resources to serve community purposes. Chebucto hosted the first Halifax Municipality web site, the first Halifax Public Library site, the first Halifax Metro United Way site, and many more. As these groups became more familiar with the internet, they began running their own servers and sites but they all started here with Chebucto first.

With the support of the Mathematics, Statistics and Computing Science Department, Chebucto Community Net developed the Chebucto Suite, or CSuite, community net software which has been used across Canada, the United States, and as far away as the Ukraine, winning the 1995 Canadian Internet Award.

Barriers to community involvement are frequently economic in nature. Chebucto Community Net has been a registered charitable organization since 1999 and gives out no cost accounts and access to hundreds of individuals and non-profit groups and organizations each year.

User training has been a big feature of the Chebucto Community Net. Courses for individuals and for webmasters were offered for many years and to this day there are volunteers helping users with their problems. Thousands of metro residents have benefited from their time with Chebucto and the fact that Halifax was rated fourth in Canada for internet access (each of the other three top cities also having a strong community net) can be attributed at least in part to these efforts.

Many Dalhousie university students have profited from their experiences working and volunteering with Chebucto. In ten years there have been dozens of students who have helped build the Chebucto Community Net and gone on to work professionally using the experience they acquired here. In the words of one, "I've had a chance to work on pretty much whatever I feel like, from stats to Lynx to ftpd to zmailer, PHP, SQL, RCS, CVS, security and that's just off the top of my head. I don't know anywhere else around here that I could get all this."

At the end of the day, what the Chebucto Community Net is about is supporting our community. For a decade, Chebucto has formed partnerships with every level of government and with many local community organizations and initiatives. The ripple effect from all of Chebucto Community Net's activities continues to spread and fan out across the world.

From Chebucto Chair Marilyn MacDonald's 2003 annual report:

In his tenth anniversary message, Chebucto's first Chair, David Trueman, congratulates "the entire Chebucto community for the success you have built together." On the brink of entering our second decade, we will need to continue to work together in service to our community. Happy Birthday. Carry it on.

Gillman Payette, President, CUMC/CCEM, reports:

The Dalhousie Math/Stats Grad Society has had a wonderful year. The main focus of the society has been to organize social events both for the entire math/stats department and also for students. We have also continued the Graduate Student Seminar.

The fall term started with a bang, we hosted a martini party to welcome graduate students and honours students, both new and returning. There was a thanksgiving potluck dinner for grad students. Halloween was celebrated with the traditional pizza lunch for the whole department. The festive season began with another cocktail party for graduate and honours students, which was a good excuse for everyone to get dressed up. The entire department celebrated the coming of the holiday season with a special lunch. This year we tried something new, Indian food instead of pizza, and it was immensely enjoyed.

The first social event of the New Year was a dinner at a Chinese Restaurant to celebrate Chinese New Year. Quite a few students turned up to ring in the year of the Monkey. There was a Casino night and a Pool Tournament to provide a much-needed diversion from the stresses of being a grad student. The end of classes was celebrated with another pizza lunch.

Throughout the year, we have hosted the Graduate Student Seminar. We were lucky to have a number of interesting speakers, both faculty and graduate students. The aim of this seminar is to present material that is at a graduate student level, and to also provide a forum for graduate students to present their own work or something of interest. We hope the seminar can continue in the coming years.

The main goal of the math/stats grad society is to promote the interests of the graduate students and to act as a social institution. We have endeavoured to achieve this over the past year. We try to bring the graduate students together as a community, and as part of the larger departmental community of students and faculty. As the winter term is ending, we look forward to planning more events and we wish everyone a wonderful summer.

Tara Taylor (President)

Paul Ottaway (Vice President)

Krista Collins (Secretary/Treasurer)

Margaret-Ellen Messinger (Department liaison)

Adrian Tang (DAGS rep)

The Math Circles is a new outreach program that began in March 2004. This is a mathematics enrichment program for high school students in the Halifax community. The purpose of the Math Circles program is to foster interest in mathematics among talented high school students and expose them to mathematics beyond the high school curriculum. This enrichment program is modeled after the highly successful Math Circles program at the University of Waterloo.

The Math Circles take place on Wednesday evenings from 6 to 8 PM, and pizza is provided for all participants. There were five scheduled meetings in the winter term, with the following speakers:

Richard Nowakowski and Paul Ottaway, "Combinatorial Games".

Keith Taylor, "Cardinal Sins of the Infinite".

Dorette Pronk, "A Journey to Fractal Land".

Richard Hoshino, "The 2004 Euclid Contest".

by Richard Hoshino

This year, I have the privilege of being one of the "Action Canada Fellows", a group of twenty young people selected across Canada to participate in an intensive program in public policy analysis and leadership development. The fellowship is funded by a five-year, $9.2 million dollar investment from the private sector and the federal government. The leadership development program includes three intensive working conferences, investigation of public policy issues, ongoing interaction among Action Canada Fellows, as well as mentoring by current leaders in government and business.

The Action Canada interview process in May 2003 was quite nerve-wracking, where they flew the 31 finalists to Ottawa for an intensive two days of meetings and interviews. I have never met such an eclectic group of inspiring and ambitious people in my life. We are all so different in our personalities, experiences, and our political leanings, but one thing we all share is an incredible love and passion for Canada. I was so privileged to be a part of this group, and was stunned when I saw the star-studded biographies of the other candidates. Most of them made my jaw drop. During the first night, my only thought was, "what on earth am I doing here?"

Despite that lovely first impression, I was miraculously chosen to be one of the twenty Fellows selected for the first year of the Action Canada Fellowship program. As a member of this fellowship cohort, I have attended two week-long conferences in Vancouver and Ottawa, and will be attending a third conference in Happy Valley, Labrador, at the end of May. During our conferences, we have had the opportunity and the privilege of meeting many distinguished Canadian leaders, in government, academia, industry, and the public sector. We have had photo-ops and conversations with famous Canadians such as Pamela Wallin, Ed Broadbent and John Ralston Saul. In my office is an autographed picture of the twenty Fellows with Jean and Aline Chretien.

During these conferences, we have had intensive crash-courses on major public policy issues such as Aboriginal self-government, Quebec separatism, Canada-USA relations, poverty, immigration, and multiculturalism. Speaking of the last issue, we met the pollster Angus Reid who shared with us some of his research on multiculturalism. Reid finds that when it comes to embracing our multicultural mosaic,

Canadians tend to be far less inclusive than Americans once you get outside of the three major cities in Canada (namely Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal). In addition to this, most minority groups perceive Canada to be more of a melting pot than the USA. Even in a city as large as Halifax, I have been approached at least twenty times by Haligonians, who ask me what part of the world I am from. Others have commented on how strong my English is, and how I don't have a noticeable accent. As someone who has spent his whole life in Canada, I find remarks like that tremendously ignorant and insulting. I never heard comments like that in Toronto. My personal experience is that when I visit more homogeneous communities in this province, I see a greater amount of ignorance about intercultural communication and embracing diversity. As a non-Caucasian, I have often felt very uncomfortable when I travel to rural communities in Nova Scotia, even when I am visiting high schools and doing math workshops for students. The Action Canada Fellowship gives me the perfect platform and the opportunity to study this issue, and make proactive change to educate people, especially the youth who will be the future leaders of our country.

In addition to the intensive conferences, all of the Action Canada Fellows are involved in a major year-long project as part of the fellowship. We have broken into several different groups, and are working on projects involving foreign policy, poverty, and youth voting. Due to my passion and interest in the issues of intercultural communication and embracing our diversity, I am part of a trio of Fellows that is working on a project involving running conferences on intercultural communication for youth. My two partners are a Toronto lawyer with the Department of Justice, and a Cornell Ph.D Science and Technology student, who is originally from Vancouver.

Our project involves the organization and coordination of two conferences in intercultural communication for high school students. Due to a great partnership with the Multicultural Association of Nova Scotia, we have decided to host these two workshops in this province, and have chosen Bridgewater and Halifax as the conference sites. The conferences aim to empower students to work together constructively and creatively with students from all backgrounds and experiences. After these conferences, the students will apply what they've learned and go back to their schools and communities and make constructive steps to raise awareness and bring about proactive change. The hope is to present these workshops as a model for other schools in the rest of Canada, through a creative media dissemination strategy (CBC radio, internet, and newsprint) to advocate how these workshops can be held nationally. We have already run a successful conference in Bridgewater which brought together 135 students from eleven different high schools in the South Shore District School Board, and

featured outstanding speakers talking about African Nova Scotian Culture, Aboriginal Culture, Understanding Islam, Homophobia, Bullying, Human Rights, and Internet Safety. The Halifax conference will take place at the end of April, and we will discuss the intricacies of effective intercultural communication, conflict resolution, and having a critical awareness of media. While different in scope, the model conferences have the same goal: to bring students into contact with the people, ideas, tools, and skills they need to build a better Canada.

Overall, the Action Canada Fellowship has been an exhilarating and empowering learning experience. Coordinating and running these youth conferences is a special privilege, and I never would have dreamed of being involved in such a project, if it were not for Action Canada. I am honoured to be a part of this special fellowship, and have learned so much about public policy, and about leadership. I have made friendships with incredible young Canadians that with last a lifetime. I might even help campaign for the Fellows someday, if any of them choose to run for Prime Minister. (It wouldn't surprise me).

Although my Action Canada work takes a great deal of time and energy from my projects at Dalhousie, I am convinced that this Fellowship is much more important (in the bigger picture) than my thesis and my own mathematical research. Striving for an effective balance has been the biggest challenge of this year, but I strangely find that working on the Action Canada project gives me more determination and focus to complete my research, and vice-versa. Being involved in a program like this helps me broaden my horizons and perspectives, and makes me more aware that as a proud Canadian citizen, my contributions to Canada need to be more than just researching and teaching mathematics. Professionally and personally, winning this Fellowship has been one of the greatest blessings that I have ever received, and I am so thankful for this opportunity.

For more information on Action Canada (the program, the biographies of this year's fellowship cohort, and information on nominating a candidate for future fellowships), please see www.actioncanada.ca

The Department of Mathematics and Statistics is glad to announce that the joint Summer 2004 Meeting of the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) and the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society (CAIMS), with participation from the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics (CSHPM) and the Canadian Symposium on Fluid Dynamics (CSFD) will be held at Dalhousie University, June 13-15, 2004.

We look forward to welcoming mathematicians and other participants to Halifax and sharing the pleasures of summertime here. The CMS meeting was held last at Dalhousie in 1990 and the CAIMS meeting was held last in Halifax in 1990 (at the Technical University of Nova Scotia which has since joined Dalhousie). Following the usual formats of both societies, the meetings will include a wide variety of symposia, a session of contributed papers, plenary speakers, prize lecturers, a graduate student poster session, and a Public Lecture.

Most activities and all scientific talks will be held on the Dalhousie campus, with the main hub of activity being at the Marion McCain Arts and Social Sciences Building.

Visit the meeting website: http://www.cms.math.ca/Events/summer04/ for the most up-to-date information.

Workshop: Singular Integrals and Analysis on CRManifolds was held May 3-8, 2004 – Funded by CRM and AARMS ($22,500) and organized by Galia Dafni (CRM) and Andrea Fraser (Dalhousie)

The theory of singular integral operators in the context of analysis on CR submanifolds of Cⁿ, in particular the Heisenberg group, has been studied and proven fruitful over the last 30 years. In recent years, the emphasis has shifted to singular integral operators which do not fall under the standard Calderon-Zygmund theory. These include operators arising from product kernels on nilpotent Lie groups, which in turn lead to the study of flag kernels. This is an in-depth workshop, bringing together from around the world, specialists in harmonic analysis, several complex variables, and symmetric spaces. The workshop featured a short-course by Alexander Nagel (Wisconsin). Visit http://www.crm.umontreal.ca/Singular for details.

The camp was held by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Dalhousie University, under the auspices of the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) and Dalhousie University, with financial support from various sources, including Dalhousie, ESSO, and NSERC/PromoScience. This was the fourth in a series of annual camps that began in 2000. The organizers, as before, were Chelluri C.A. Sastri and Suraj Sikka.

The format of the camp was essentially the same as in previous years. The instructors were faculty members at Dalhousie, with three exceptions: Professors Robert Dawson and Bert Hartnell are from St. Mary’s University, and Mr. Paul Ottaway is a graduate student at Dalhousie. Paul has had experience with math camps, having attended and conducted camps at Waterloo. He doubled as a chaperone. Nobody, among the instructors, organizers or helpers, of whom there were many, received any payment for services rendered. However, all of them will be invited to a thank-you dinner.

The camp was supported by Dalhousie and the CMS. The CMS, with support from ESSO, NSERC/PromoScience and perhaps other sources, contributed $3000.00. Dalhousie supported the camp in many ways: $3000.00 from the President’s Office, $2000.00 from the Office of the Dean of Science; free use of the classrooms and the computer lab; free secretarial help, photocopying and miscellaneous items and services from the department; and free faculty time. We received enthusiastic help and support from our colleagues in organizing the camp and are grateful for it. A registration fee of $50 per student was charged except in cases of financial exigency.

Matjaz Omladic (University of Ljubljana) visited the department from January 25- February 1, 2004.

Kyoung Lee and Won Kim will be Visiting Professors in Mathematics in 2005. They will be working with K.K. Tan.

A. Zhalij, (NATO-NSERC PDF, CRM, Montreal and Institute of Mathematics, Kiev, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) visited the department on March 1,

2004. He gave a talk on "Separation of variables in (1+3)-dimensional Schroedinger equations with vector-potential" in the Mathematical Physics Seminar.

Luca Greco, PhD student from the University of Padua will be working with Chris Field from June to August.

Claudia Chanu, Department of Mathematics, University of Turin, Italy. Claudia will be visiting us during the period June 10-19, 2004. She will be also participating at the CMS Annual Meeting and giving a talk.

Christophe Herbinger, who has a joint appointment in Mathematics, Statistics and Biology (where he holds the StoraEnso Chair in Forest Genetics and Biotechnology) has been awarded a grant from the Atlantic Innovation Fund for a project entitled "Molecular and statistical tools to improve tree breeding". This is one of the two projects funded at Dalhousie. Chris Field and Bruce Smith from this department, and C. Thompson (U.N.B St John) are collaborators on the project, with StoraEnso Port Hawkesbury as industrial partner. In addition, Christophe is also a collaborator on an industry-led halibut broodstock development proposal as well as two other successful AIF proposals that were put forward by the Institut de Recherche sur les Zones Cotieres, Universite de Moncton. The genetic component of these last two projects on Arctic char and American oyster will take place at Dalhousie University. In total, this represents about one million dollars of AIF funding over the next 5 years. Congratulations, Christophe.

Hong Gu and 6 others from Computer Science (Theodore Chiasson, Vlado Keslj, Raza Abidi, Anthony Cox, Norbert Zeh, Thomas Trappenberg) have received the largest CFI New Opportunity award in the country, which is in the amount of approximately $1.9M for research equipment and research infrastructure. The title of the grant is "Scientific visualization through data mining of electronic commerce and health informatics large scale data sets". The funding source includes $700,000 from CFI, $700,000 from NSRIT (Nova Scotia Research Infrastructure Trust), $190,000 from the Faculty of Computer Science, and close to $300,000 in kind contributions from vendors. $1M of the grant is targeted for building a 3200 sq.ft. lab on the (new) fifth floor of the Computer Science building, as well as a 300 sq.ft. machine room. The two floor addition to the Computer Science building is scheduled to be completed by December 2004.

In February 2004 Roman Smirnov was awarded an NSERC research grant: 14K per year for 5 years.

Joint Research Project receives renewed funding from NSERC Collaborative Health Research Projects (CHRP).

The research project entitled "Simulation and localization of cardiac dysfunction: from mathematical models to clinical applications" is a joint collaboration between John Clements (mathematics), Milan Horacek (biophysics), Martin

Gardner and John Sapp (cardiology), John Fitz-Clarke (emergency medicine) and graduate students and Post Doctoral Fellows in the respective departments. The objective of this research is to derive anatomically and physiologically accurate mathematical models of electrical activation in the human heart. These comprehensive simulation models will be used to (i) non-invasively locate and quantify arrhythmogenic substrate in cardiac patients, (ii) assess the potential effects of anti-arrhythmic drug interventions and (iii) predict the consequences of related cardiac therapies. This project has been granted funding for an additional three years.

Puzzles from the book "Puzzles 101", A Puzzlemaster’s Challenge, by Nobuyuki Yoshigahara, translated by Richard Weyhrauch and Yasuko Weyhrauch, A. K. Peters, Natick, MA, 2003. [A review of this book will appear in CMS NOTES, September 2004 issue]

After you have had a chance to think about these two puzzles, turn the page for the solutions.

There is a gasoline crisis. Assume that the gas stations are located on a long circular route and they contain together just enough gas to make one trip around. Then it can be shown that if you start at the right station with an empty tank you can make it all the way around. Here is how: First imagine that you begin at Station 1 with, say, 10 litres of gas. You go around the route emptying each gas station as you go. When you return to Station 1 you will have the same amount of gas in your tank as you started with, namely, 10 litres. Further as you proceed along the route, keep track of how much gas is left in the tank as you pull into each gas station. Suppose this quantity is minimized at a certain Station. Then, if you start at this Station with an empty tank, you will not run of gas during the entire trip.

Two Cape Cod fishermen had an argument one day as to which one was the better mathematician. Finally the captain of the fishing trawler proposed the following problem to them as a test: If a fishing crew caught five hundred pounds of salmon, brought the catch to the port and sold it at sixty cents a pound, how much would they receive for the catch? The two old fellows got to work but neither seemed to be able to arrive at an answer. After some time, one of them approached the captain and asked him to repeat the problem. The captain started off, "If a fishing crew caught five hundred pounds of salmon and…" "Wait a minute there, wait a minute please," said the fisherman, "Is it salmon they caught?" "Yep," answered the captain. "Good grief, it ain’t no wonder I couldn’t get the answer. I have been figuring on codfish all the time!"