We are looking for additional columnists to report back from the different corners of the nonlinear world. If you would like to become another of them, do contact the editors at uk-nonl@ucl.ac.uk.
Immediately following the above Applied
Mathematics conference, a combustion meeting in Honour of Prof
Brian Gray was held from 11 - 12 February 1999 also at Mollymook,
Australia. This was to mark Brian's retirement from Macquarie
University (Sydney, Australia) where he has held a chair in
Chemistry since 1977. We are sure that the combustion community
both locally and internationally are well aware that this is only
a retirement from academia and not from combustion research. The
meeting was also to pay tribute to Brian's enormous and valuable
contribution to areas such as quantum chemistry, branching chain
reactions, muscle modelling, spontaneous ignition (both theory
and experiments), and general nonlinear analysis of chemical
reactions. There were around 25 delegates, some of whom came from
as far as the U.K. and U.S.A. especially for this meeting.
Perhaps this isn't surprising as Brian's career has taken him to
many countries and his 190 publications to date have included 61
co-authors. Overall the meeting was a huge success with excellent
talks, great weather and a picturesque location. Most of the
papers presented at this meeting have also been submitted to an
upcoming special edition of the Journal of the Australian
Mathematics Society, Series B (Applied Mathematics).