Australian Mathematical Society Web Site

ARC large grants

Also of interest might be

• The Australian Research Council home page.
• ARC page of Successful Large Grants. This contains some (very large) files of 1998 Grants awarded, plus a much smaller and more helpful file of the grants awarded in 1997.
  (This page is no longer available, but a selection of similar information, for 1997 and later years, can be found by browsing here.)

Mathematics grants from Mathematics & Physics Panel 1999-2001

• VV Anh, CC Heyde, M Farge, QUT, Structural Study of Long-Range Dependence, Infinite Variance and Coherent Structures. $60,000 $62,000 $64,000
• RA Bartnik, U Canberra, Einstein Equations, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves: Theoretical Properties, Algorithms and Computer Simulation $52,000 $52,000 $52,000
• JJ Cannon, U Sydney, An Integrated Approach to Computation in Arithmetic Fields $88,000 $90,000 $96,000
• A Carey , U Adelaide, Type II spectral flow and applications to mathematical physics $36,000 $36,000 $36,000
• EN Dancer, U Sydney, Population Models and Partial Differential Equations $68,000 $70,000 $72,000
• K Ecker , Monash, Mean Curvature Flow of Noncompact Spacelike Hypersurfaces in Asymptotically Flat Spacetimes with Applications in General Relativity $53,000 $55,000 $57,000
• P Hall, ANU, Theory and Applications of Computer-Intensive Statistical Methods $180,000 $186,000 $204,000
• IR James and RA Maller, Murdoch, Multivariate Failure Time Analysis $50,000 $52,000 $54,000
• N Joshi, MD Kruskal, MJ Ablowitz, S Chakravarti , U Adelaide, Complex Asymptotics and Integrability $65,000 $67,000 $69,000
• R Kohn, SJ Sheather, UNSW, Flexible methods for estimating regression models $60,000 $55,000 $57,000
• GI Lehrer, U Sydney, Group Representation Theory and Cohomology of Algebraic Varieties $100,500 $102,500 $104,500
• A McIntosh, Macquarie, Harmonic Analysis, Boundary Value Problems, and Maxwell's Equations in Lipschitz Domains $79,000 $81,000 $83,000
• RK Milne, GF Yeo, BW Madsen, UWA, Ion Channel Interactions: Stochastic Modelling and Inference $53,000 $55,000 $57,000
• ES Noussair, EN Dancer, UNSW, The effects of the domain geometry and topology in nonlinear elliptic equations $58,500 $60,500 $66,500
• CE Pearce, U Adelaide, Tight bounds for some performance measures in loss systems occurring in telecommunications networks $53,000 $55,000 $57,000
• CE Praeger, UWA, Transitive Graphs and Quasiprimitive Permutation Groups $60,000 $57,000 $63,000
• L Qi, R Womersley, UNSW, SQP and QP-free algorithms for nonlinear programming $55,000 $57,000 $59,000
• I Raeburn , U Newcastle, Toeplitz algebras, semigroup corssed products, and number theory $78,000 $80,000 $82,000
• RA Sammut, AV Buryak, YS Kivshar, UNSW (ADFA), Parametric wave mixing in nonlinear optical materials $53,000 $50,000 $55,000
• IH Sloan, UNSW, Numerical integration and approximation in high dimensions $68,000 $70,000 $76,000
• R Street, G Kelly, RFC Walters, M Johnson, Macquarie, Category Theory Arising from Geometry, Algebra, Computer Science and Physics $121,000 $124,000 $127,000
• RC Wolff and KL Mengersen, QUT, Convergence Diagnostics for Markov Chain Monte Carlo: A Non-Parametric and Non-Linear Dynamical Systems Approach $25,000 $24,906 $50,000

Some comments from Ian Sloan

(Chair of the Mathematics and Physics Panel)

I think it is important to reflect a little on what a success rate of this order actually means. People often speak as if a successs rate of 20% means that one in five of Australia's academic researchers receive funding, but that is simply incorrect. What it means is that (on the average) one in five OF THOSE WHO APPLY receive funding. In some disciplines it is already the case that the pool of applicants taken over a three year cycle is much smaller than the number of academic researchers in the discipline, because many in the discipline have decided that applying for large grants is for them a waste of time, and so have withdrawn from the competition. The result of the withdrawals is that the remaining pool of applicants contains a higher proportion of applicants who ought to have a reasonable expectation of success.

In such a situation there is a real possibility of a progressive downward spiral in the number of applications, very soon leading to complete collapse. In some disciplines I think that there is evidence that this is already happening. This is something that ought to concern professional associations, who might want to argue that the extremely low funding levels of the last two years put at risk the very viability of the Large Grants scheme.

I finish with one further comment about the 1998 maths grants. I know that there has been much comment about the grants in pure mathematics in particular, so let me give some figures. If we say that there were 10 pure mathematics grants (there is always some question of definition), then that represents a success rate of 25% - for there were only 40 pure maths applications! The fact that this is higher than the general success rate reflects a perception of high quality of the pure maths applications (see above!). But it is obvious that other disciplines have to "pay" for this.

I hope that this casts a little light on a troubled subject.

Ian Sloan

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Last Update: 6 May 1998