The early Cold War was a good time to found a School of Mathematics. People were so appreciative of any little thing you could do to speed up calculations for nuclear reactions, or to make young scientists better trained than the goddamn Russkies. With few other universities being founded, it was also an ideal time to pick up some of the refugee scientists displaced by the events of the War and earlier. The energy of the Vice-Chancellor, Philip Baxter, in securing some of the best of these itinerant geniuses formed the basis of UNSW's early takeoff and eventual rise to overtake the reputation of Another Metropolitan University.

In Mathematics, the newcomers included John Blatt and George Szekeres. Blatt, an Austrian and originally a theoretical nuclear physicist, had a forceful personality that appealed to Baxter and was appointed foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics (1959-84). His energy soon made UNSW a leader in such applied fields as optimal control and mathematical computing. He also attracted to UNSW the leading Hungarian pure mathematician, George Szekeres, an expert in the expanding field of combinatorics. George, now in his nineties and still researching, was awarded an AM in the 2002 honours list. Those early efforts proved a sound foundation for the School's later strengths such as functional analysis and algebra (in Pure Mathematics) and numerical analysis and optimization (in Applied).

Statistics has been a crucial part of the School from the beginning. Jim Douglas recalls in his booklet `A brief history of the Department of Statistics' being on deck in 1949 to teach advanced students (he is still an Honorary Associate of the School). The Statistics Department has taken advantage of the huge advances in computational power to move into such developing fields as data mining, financial mathematics and spatio-temporal modelling.

Unusually among Schools of Mathematics, UNSW has vigorously pursued one very applied specialty, meteorology and oceanography. Work in the School's Centre for Environmental Modelling and Prediction aims to get the "big picture" of the interaction between oceans and the atmosphere, which drives such global phenomena as El Niño

The School has also been active in interactions with high school education, with members taking a leading part in HSC exams and in defending syllabuses against "dumbing down". The magazine Parabola has been providing enrichment material for talented high school students since 1964 Baxter said at the launch, "There is a world-wide shortage of both [scientists and mathematicians], particularly of mathematicians, which, if it is not met by the present generation of students, will continue to retard the rate of technological advance for many years to come." That is still true, as many more sciences have gained mathematical sophistication - bioinformatics being only the latest example.


Old hands from a decade or three back would find a few changes. For one thing, Mathematics moved to the Red Centre (above), an attractive and airy building in the middle of lower campus, in 1998. Number crunching is now all clicking on the coloured icons instead of sweating over punched cards (but still, the need to understand what the algorithms are doing is as strong as ever). The School in fact was a leader in introducing symbolic calculation packages to teaching - Maple, the package mostly used, is capable of getting a substantial HSC mark on its own, and does a good job of taking away some of the drudgery of integrating and solving equations. Another teaching innovation has been a compulsory course on Professional Issues and Ethics in Mathematics - it includes talks by alumni on the truth about workplaces in the real world. There are new courses on mathematical modelling, with oral presentations of team projects. But many things are unchanged - let's be frank, the best methods of solving linear equations were discovered long ago, and there's no mileage in being "innovative". And the lecturers are still as youthful, buoyant and attractive as ever (well, that's their story - check their websites and see).


In 2002, the School was pleased to receive a high ranking from Sciencewatch, based on the citation impact of its work. UNSW was ranked 14th in the world in mathematics, just above Oxford, Berkeley and MIT.

The School was heavily involved in ICIAM 2003, the 5th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the biggest mathematical meeting ever held in Australia. UNSW mathematician Ian Sloan is the international president of ICIAM, the sponsoring organisation.

For a record of recent news items in the School, click here.

Pictured: Agnes Nikov, VC Sir Philip Baxter, Ted Buchwald, George Szekeres, 1968

The School's home page as of 13 Jan 1998.