Day 5: aka Day 2 of QANZIAM 2010

A much more civilised 6.30 awakening today. Breakfast, then basically straight up to the conf for an earlier 9am start.

The student talks were finished off in the morning with Kelly Murphy, Mike Hsieh and Jackie Horne. All nice topics - hypertrophic scars, drug delivery/moving boundary problems, and bone healing respectively. Then Owen Jepps from Griffith finished off the morning session talking about topical delivery of treatments on the skin - something I will be investigating myself next year with a Pharmacy researcher from Otago (Natalie Medlicott).

Aftern morning tea I was up. The talk went ok I think, with lots of input and discussion from the audience, especially Graeme. But that meant I went way over time (10mins) so I'm sorry about that. But went ok I think. I got a few good ideas to help frame my next talk and also the paper that should come out of the work. I actually got a few things straight in my head as I spoke.

Scotty went next - talking about a "simple" example that he thinks would work well in an undergrad/grad class on asymptotics. I understood a fair bit of it which was impressive to me! I honestly can't recall really what he spoke about, but there was lots of integration in the complex plane and singularities expansions in small parameters and so forth.

Graeme then came on and talked about his work with Wechselberger that extends his holes in the wall of singularities work from his PhD back in the 90s. This was cool because I had also done some of this stuff in my PhD - analysis of phase planes with DEs of the form f(u,v) u' = g(u,v) and v'=h(u,v) where f can go to 0 giving a wall of singularities in the plane. G and Wechselberger looked at the problem under a different light, actually INCREASING the number of equations (rather than simplifying to less) to look at the problem in a higher dimensional space and showing that solutions through the wall (when f=g=0) can exist and what's more, are stable. They also demonstrated stable jump solutions. All quite cool - this was my favourite talk I think.

The last talk was Vivien Challis from UQ who also talked about topology optimisation but related to bone implants.

That was about it. QANZIAM as always was relaxed and fun... it was no Stanthorpe though :P