The 39th Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society was held in Hobart from 3rd to 7th of July 1995. Numbers were a bit lower than expected (88 registrants) and we extend our sympathy to those who were unable to attend (not least to those who had to return home at the end of the Council Meeting on the Sunday).
The conference was opened by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Tasmania, Professor Alan Gilbert. Immediately afterwards the President, Derek Robinson, presented the 1995 Australian Mathematical Society Medal to Adrian Baddeley of the University of Western Australia.
The citation accompanying the medal said
Following the presentation Adrian spoke on some aspects of his work.
A welcome reception was held that evening at the University Club, a number of excursions were organized for the Wednesday afternoon and the conference dinner was held on the Thursday night in the Long Gallery, Salamanca Place. In between we had a programme of nine invited lectures, about 50 contributed talks, a public lecture and an evening forum on the promotion of mathematics.
The invited lectures, all of which were given in plenary sessions, covered aspects of the prehistory of mathematics (Mike Deakin on the origins of our number words) its history (Bill Dunham on the remarkable sums of Euler) and, I suppose, its future (Jon Borwein on experimental mathematics) as well as topics in contemporary algebra (Edmund Puczylowski on Koethe's nil ideal problem, Peter Trotter on regular semigroups), analysis (Art Kirk on metric fixed point theorems), stochastic dynamical systems (Peter Kloeden on stochastic differential equations) and symbolic dynamics and chaos (Ed Packel).
Bill Dunham also gave a well-attended public lecture on the Wednesday evening in which he talked about the lives, times and priority disputes of Newton and Leibniz.
Both Bill Dunham and Mike Deakin were interviewed on ABC radio. This was valuable exposure for the conference and the Society.
John Donaldson organized the Tuesday night forum on the promotion of mathematics and this attracted a substantial audience, including some non-conference people from the University of Tasmania's Centre for Education.
Among the contributed talks, 10 were given by full- or part-time students, and the student speakers competed for the B.H. Neumann Prize ($200 plus a free conference dinner) for the best student talk. The winner was May Nilsen of the University of Newcastle for her talk ``Ideals in C*-algebras''.
We thank the Judging Committee for the student prize (Jane Pitman, Jacqui Ramagge and Terry Mills) for generously giving of their time for this purpose virtually throughout the whole conference.
Of the many people who helped in many ways in the preparation for the conference, three members of the Mathematics Department of the University of Tasmania deserve special mention: Betty Golding, Helen Chick and Kym Hill.
Department of Mathematics
The University of Tasmania
Hobart
Professor Michel Mend\`es France (Universit\'e de Bordeaux I) is the Mahler Lecturer for 1995. In this capacity he presented an excellent invited lecture at the 1995 annual conference in Hobart. Previous Mahler lecturers were Professor J.H. Coates (1991) and Professor D.B. Zagler (1993).
Below would be photos of most of the student speakers and invited speakers at the conference. Unfortunately they cannot be reproduced here right now.