About the Mathematics and Statistics Department
Head of Department: Professor Jennifer Brown
The Mathematics and Statistics Department is located in the Maths and Computer Science building. Reception is on level 4 on the north side. The department has 28 academic staff, including the chairs in Statistics, Applied Mathematics and Pure Mathematics. We offer a wide range of courses, and teach for all levels from stage one up to PhD.
Members of the Department are engaged in research in a number of fields within mathematics and statistics. The department has a research centre, the Biomathematics Research Centre, and research interests in the Centre For Bioengineering, the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution (AWCMEE), and the New Zealand Government Centre of Research Excellence (CORE). Thus the Department has strong research interests in the area of Biomathematics with a number of staff actively working on a variety of problems involving both discrete and continuous processes. There is a strong computational group in the Department with interests in approximation, optimization, numerical linear algebra, and computer algebra (CAS). There are also strong links to the College of Engineering. The Department has researchers working in ring theory, geometry, combinatorics, harmonic analysis, and the potential theory of differential operators. There are also staff members working in mathematical education and the history of mathematics. The Department has a strong research group in statistics working in a number of areas.
Mathematics and statistics are living subjects with new processes, techniques and theories constantly being devised, tested and explored. The extensive use of the computer in a wide range of academic areas has led to an increasing demand for mathematical and statistical analysis in many fields previously unconcerned with mathematics. This means that mathematicians and statisticians are being asked to develop new tools and techniques to deal with problems in areas from business management to biology, as well as considering new insights being opened up in the more traditional areas of physical science and engineering. All this activity leads not only to new applications of mathematics and statistics, but also to new theoretical work on the structure of the mathematics involved.
