News

Honour for UNSW mathematician
June 10, 2008

Professor Sloan Professor Sloan

One of UNSW's most distinguished mathematicians, Scientia Professor Ian Sloan, has been appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the latest Queen's Birthday Honours list.

Professor Sloan, AO, was awarded the honour "for service to education through the study of mathematics, particularly in the field of computational mathematics, as an academic, researcher and mentor, and to a range of national and international professional associations".

He joined UNSW as a Lecturer in 1965 and was appointed to a Personal Chair in Mathematics in 1983. He was Head of the UNSW School of Mathematics from 1986 to 1990 and from 1992 to 1993.

"Professor Sloan is an outstanding computational mathematician, noted not only for his extensive research, but also for his contributions to national and international societies, and as a mentor and friend to PhD students, postdoctoral fellows and colleagues," says Associate Professor Rob Womersley, the current Head of School.

"Ian joined the University of New South Wales in 1965, initially as a mathematical physicist. He then moved to numerical analysis publishing over 200 papers on the numerical solution of integral equations, numerical integration and interpolation, boundary integral equations, multiple integration, continuous complexity theory and other parts of numerical analysis and approximation theory."

Professor Sloan is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, was awarded the ANZIAM Medal in 1997, the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal of the Australian Academy of Science in 2001 and the Information Based Complexity Prize in 2005.

He has served as Chair of the Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics Panel of the Australian Research Council (ARC) and as a member of the ARC's Research Grants Committee. He was President of the Australian Mathematical Society and is immediate past President of the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and is a member of the editorial board of a number of international journals.

He is also Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Mathematics and Statistics of Complex System (MASCOS) and has an extensive record of success with ARC research grants, both for fundamental research and industry linked projects.

After schooling in Ballarat in Victoria, Australia, Ian Sloan completed physics and mathematics degrees at Melbourne University, a Master's degree in mathematical physics at Adelaide, and a PhD in theoretical atomic physics (under the supervision of H.S.W. Massey) at the University of London, in 1964. He was employed by Australia's CSR Company from 1961 to 1965, when he joined UNSW.

After a decade of research on few-body collision problems in nuclear physics, and publishing some 35 papers in the physics literature, his main research interests shifted to numerical analysis. Since making that change he has published some 150 papers on the numerical solution of integral equations, numerical integration and interpolation, boundary integral equations, multiple integration, continuous complexity theory and other parts of numerical analysis and approximation theory.

Professor Ian Sloan's current research interests are in boundary integral methods, finite element methods, high dimensional numerical integration and related issues of information-based complexity, multivariate approximation theory and the time discretisation of evolution problems.

His research has been well supported by ARC grants, including a six-year Program Grant from 1988 to 1993. His current ARC large grants are for: numerical analysis of evolution problems in several variables (with M. Ganesh and W. McLean), and numerical integration and approximation in high dimensions. He has been an active teacher over a wide range of mathematical subjects.

 

Links:

Professor Sloan's homepage is at http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~sloan/