Connecting Minds. Transforming Mathematics.
December 1st - 4th 2026
The 70th Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, hosted by The University of Western Australia, Perth.
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About the Conference
Welcome to the 70th Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, which will be held from the 1st – 4th December 2026, hosted at the stunning campus of the University of Western Australia in Perth.
Bringing together researchers, educators, students, and industry leaders from across Australia and around the world, AustMS 2026 is a celebration of mathematical discovery, collaboration, and impact. From fundamental theory to real-world applications, the conference showcases the depth and diversity of contemporary mathematical sciences.
Set against the unique backdrop of Western Australia, this year’s meeting offers an opportunity to connect across disciplines, exchange ideas, and explore new directions in mathematics.
Plenary Speaker Profiles
Our invited speakers span a broad spectrum of disciplines, from pure mathematics and statistics to applied, computational, and interdisciplinary research, reflecting the depth and diversity of the mathematical sciences today. Their work addresses fundamental theoretical questions while also driving impact across areas such as data science, industry and technology.
Vera Roshchina
Hanna Neumann Lecturer
UNSW
Title: Facial structure of convex sets: how complicated can it get?
Abstract
Conic optimisation has brought renewed attention to questions about the facial structure of convex sets. Although convexity appears throughout pure and applied mathematics, and convex geometry has a rich and well-developed theory, we still lack simple intrinsic tools for describing and understanding facial structure. Some aspects of facial structure behave just as low-dimensional intuition suggests, while others become considerably more complicated already in dimensions four and five. I will discuss some of these phenomena and describe recent attempts to develop a language and tools for studying the facial structure of convex sets directly.
Biography
Good day! I’m Vera Roshchina, an applied mathematician working on convex and nonsmooth problems, primarily in optimisation. I am currently an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at UNSW Sydney, where I also lead the School’s Research Nexus Frontiers in Fundamental Mathematics.
Before joining UNSW in 2018, I was an ARC DECRA Research Fellow at RMIT University and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Melbourne, Federation University Australia, and the University of Évora (Portugal). In 2021, I was awarded the Christopher Heyde Medal by the Australian Academy of Science. I obtained my PhD from the City University of Hong Kong, and my undergraduate degree from Saint Petersburg State University.
Chad Topaz
Dr Yuniupingu Lecturer
Williams College
Data Science, Social Justice, and the Criminal Legal System
Abstract
I spent the first part of my career modelling pattern formation in fluids, chemical systems, and biological swarms. Then I changed course: similar mathematical habits of mind, new questions about justice. In this talk I examine parts of the criminal legal system of the United States and show what quantitative approaches can reveal about them. We will see how data document, at the scale of entire systems, racial inequities that individuals and communities experience one case at a time We will also confront the special care demanded when data are produced by the very institutions under scrutiny. Dr Yunupingu envisioned education holding Indigenous and Western knowledges together, with mathematics as a meeting point. In that spirit, I will argue that communities’ lived knowledge of injustice and the mathematical sciences complement one another in the pursuit of justice. This talk is broadly accessible, with no specific technical background assumed.
Biography
Chad Topaz (A.B. Harvard, Ph.D. Northwestern) is Professor of Complex Systems at Williams College and co-founder of the QSIDE Institute, an independent nonprofit working at the intersection of data science and social justice. The author of more than 100 publications, Chad began his career using mathematics to understand problems in physics, chemistry, and biology, and now focuses on confronting inequity across the criminal legal system, education, environment, arts and media, and democratic institutions. His work has been covered in The Atlantic, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Science, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Washington Post, and his public-facing writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Inside Higher Ed. He is the author of Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change. His honors include a Kavli Frontiers Fellowship from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Mary and Alfie Gray Award for Social Justice from the Association for Women in Mathematics, a best paper award from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Sorgenfrey Distinguished Teaching Award from UCLA, and the Rossmann Excellence in Teaching Award from Macalester College.
Luciana Basualdo Bonatto
ECR Lecturer
University Of Oxford
Biography
My research interests include Configuration Spaces, Diffeomorphism Groups, Homological Stability, Embedding Calculus, Knot Theory, and Operad Theory.
Christopher Lustri
ANZIAM Lecturer
University of Sydney
The Devil's Invention: Unpacking Stokes' Phenomenon using Divergent Series
Abstract
Divergent series have historically been seen as a barrier to understanding. In asymptotic analysis, however, divergence is a source of information. I will show how divergent asymptotic series can be used to study an important phenomenon in differential equations: the sudden appearance or disappearance of exponentially small (or non-perturbative) effects known as Stokes’ phenomenon. I will first introduce this phenomenon and explain how it can be understood through exponential asymptotics and divergent resummation, including ideas from resurgence.
I will then turn to discrete systems, focusing on the discrete nonlinear Schr”{o}dinger equation. Standard asymptotic methods break down for this system, revealing a new layer of structure in the problem. I will explain how Borel transforms and conformal mapping can be used to overcome this breakdown and recover exponentially small information that would otherwise be lost. Here, Stokes phenomenon provides a way to understand a critical feature of the solutions: the only standing waves that can exist are centred either on a lattice site or halfway between two sites. I will show how careful asymptotic analysis can determine the exponentially small eigenvalues associated with these solutions, and use them to explain their stability.
Biography
Chris Lustri is a senior lecturer in applied mathematics at the University of Sydney. He primarily works on understanding asymptotic analysis and resurgence, and how these methods may be applied to partial differential equations and discrete systems. He uses these techniques to study problems arising in nonlinear waves, fluid dynamics, and integrable systems.
After completing his PhD in 2013 at the University of Oxford, Chris was employed as a postdoctoral research at The University of Sydney. In 2016 he was appointed to a faculty position at Macquarie University, moving to the University of Sydney in 2023. Chris has received the J. H. Michell Medal (ANZIAM, 2023) and the Christopher Heyde Medal (Australian Academy of Science, 2024).
Joshua Zahl
Chern Institute of Mathematics
Nankai University
The Besicovitch compression phenomenon & the Kakeya set conjecture
Abstract
In 1919, Besicovitch constructed a compact set in the plane with Lebesgue measure 0 that contains a unit line segment pointing in every direction. Such objects are now called measure 0 Besicovitch sets (aka Kakeya sets). By replacing a measure zero Besicovitch set by its \delta-thickening, one obtains a collection of 1 x \delta rectangles pointing in different directions, the sum of whose areas is 1, but whose union has very small volume. The existence of such collections of rectangles is called the Besicovitch compression phenomenon.
The Kakeya set conjecture is a quantitative statement controlling the strength of the Besicovitch compression phenomenon. In this talk, I will discuss connections between the Besicovitch compression phenomenon, the Kakeya set conjecture, and questions in harmonic analysis and PDE.
Biography
I am a professor at the Chern Institute of Mathematics at Nankai University. Prior to this I was an associate professor in the mathematics department at the University of British Columbia. I have a broad interest in classical harmonic analysis and combinatorics. I’m especially interested in incidence geometry, the restriction and Kakeya problems, and sum-product phenomena.
Gary Froyland
University of
New South Wales
Spectral Approaches to Complex Dynamics
Abstract
The weather and the climate, along with social processes, biological processes, and engineering processes, are all dynamical systems because they are governed by a set of micro-rules at the level of individual states that describe how processes evolve over time. Complex dynamical systems incorporate elements of unpredictability (nearby initial states quickly diverge from one another) and emergence (macroscopic system behaviour is not apparent from the set of micro-rules due to many interacting components).
Emergent behaviour in complex dynamical systems is typically connected with the appearance of macro-structures that persist for a certain amount of time.
Examples of such macro-structures include eddies in the ocean, cyclonic storms or heatwaves in the atmosphere, and the coalescing of societal opinion around a particular issue. It is these macro-phenomena that impact our daily world, but it remains challenging to identify key organising emergent phenomena from micro-rules or spatiotemporal observations. Part of the difficulty arises from the usually complicated nonlinear dynamics of the micro-rules. To access these macro-phenomena, we use a linear operator induced by the micro-dynamics. This linear operator – the transfer operator – acts on ensembles of individual states, and its linearity enables one to access a huge toolbox from linear analysis.
In this talk, we gently introduce the transfer operator and its associated spectral theory. We also make connections to a dynamic spectral geometry of evolving manifolds, centred on the dynamic Laplace operator. Several example analyses are presented, ranging across problems in climate, physical oceanography, and atmospheric science.
Biography
Gary Froyland’s research lies at the interfaces of probability, geometry, operator theory, optimisation, and learning in dynamical systems. His research ranges from pure mathematics through to computation and application to industry and other scientific disciplines.
Neena Gupta
Indian Statistical Institute
Kolkata
Some Problems and Challenges in Affine Algebraic Geometry
Abstract
In this talk we shall discuss a few fundamental problems in the area of Affine Algebraic Geometry including the Epimorphism Problem of Abhyankar–Sathaye, Affine Fibration problem, Affine form problem, the Zariski Cancellation Problem and the Linearisation Problem. We shall also discuss a few recent developments on them and how they are interconnected.
Biography
Neena Gupta was born in 1984 at Kolkata. Her education from early childhood till PhD research had been in India. She obtained her PhD degree, under the supervision of Professor Amartya Kumar Dutta, from the Indian Statistical Institute in 2012. Earlier, she had obtained her M.Math. (Master of Mathematics) degree from the same institute in 2008. Before that she studied at Bethune College. She did her post-doctoral research at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai in 2012.
Neena is known for her outstanding contributions to fundamental questions in affine algebraic geometric and commutative algebra, and especially for her complete solutions to the longstanding `Zariski Cancellation Problem’ for affine spaces in positive characteristic. Neena began her research career by studying global properties of certain affine varieties whose either local structure, or whose structure of fibres were given. She discovered the structure of locally Laurent polynomial algebras, a beautiful analogue of the theorem on locally polynomial algebras by Bass-Connell-Wright and Suslin, and other results on Laurent polynomial fibrations and related topics. Neena has developed general theories on a certain family of affine varieties which reveal surprising connections between deep questions on affine spaces and provide much sought-after conditions for the varieties to be affine spaces. In particular, she has demonstrated new families of linear hypersurfaces in higher-dimensional affine spaces which satisfy the Abhyankar-Sathaye Conjecture on the Epimorphism Problem. Some of her other significant discoveries include new algebraic characterisations of affine two and three spaces. New examples of non-cancellative varieties, certain K-theoretic properties of the ring of invariants of G_a-actions on affine spaces which she used to settle a question of Miyanishi, new results on the triviality of separable affine three forms, results on retractions of polynomial algebras, and results and examples around questions on finite generation of algebras arising out of Hilbert’s fourteenth problem.
Roslyn Hickson
Public Lecturer
James Cook University
The experiment
you can't run
Abstract
Sometimes we can’t answer a question by trying things and seeing what happens. We can’t tell some people to wear masks and others not, just to find out how many need to wear one to prevent an outbreak. Releasing modified mosquitoes could permanently change an ecosystem, and we can’t un-release them. But decisions still need to be made, and usually under a deadline.
This talk is about what mathematics does in that gap, and how we can use models to run experiments we can’t run in real life. A model is where you get to explore and be wrong with fewer real consequences, if any.
I will share three stories from nearly twenty years of modelling to inform decisions like these, both about how I got involved in the work and about how the mathematics helped. I’ll start with Mathematics-in-Industry Study Groups, where partners arrive knowing they need help, though not always knowing what to ask. The second story is the modelling of mask wearing on Sydney’s train network in 2020. The third is current work in progress with communities in the Torres Strait on mosquito control. Along the way I will talk about what we knew, what we didn’t, and how often the useful thing turned out to be the questions rather than the answers.
Biography
Prof Roslyn Hickson is a Science Leader for Emerging Infectious Diseases, a joint appointment between CSIRO and James Cook University. Her research focuses on the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases to inform policy and practice, with a particular emphasis on emerging, vector-borne, and zoonotic diseases through the lenses of biosecurity and One Health.
Roslyn was awarded the inaugural KA Landman Medal by ANZIAM in 2026 for outstanding contributions to industrial mathematics. Her work has had direct policy impact, including COVID-19 modelling that contributed to mask mandates on the NSW public transport network, and collaboration with Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control on dengue fever surveillance. She has held research positions at the Australian National University, the University of Newcastle, IBM Research Australia, and the University of Melbourne, and was twice named a finalist in the MIT Technology Review EmTech Asia Innovators Under 35 list. She was awarded a Victorian Young Tall Poppy in 2018.
Johanna Knapp
ANZAMP Lecturer
University of Melbourne
The physical mathematics of stringy extra dimensions
Abstract
String theory is a theoretical framework that unifies all known fundamental forces of nature. It also predicts the existence of extra space-time dimensions. The mathematical structure of the extra dimensions determines the physics we observe in our universe. It is possible to use theoretical physics methodology, such as quantum field theory, to study the mathematical properties of stringy extra dimensions. The physics results then translate into provable mathematical conjectures.
After providing an overview of the general concepts, the talk will focus on Calabi-Yau spaces as candidates for extra dimensions. These provide a particularly rich, interdisciplinary area of research for mathematicians and string theorists. We will discuss how Calabi-Yaus and their moduli spaces can be studied via certain supersymmetric field theories.
Biography
Dr Johanna Knapp is a researcher in mathematical physics at the University of Melbourne, working at the intersection of algebraic geometry, gauge theory, and string theory. Her research explores deep connections between geometry and fundamental physics, contributing to our understanding of quantum field theory and the mathematical structures underlying the universe.
Dr Knapp is also an experienced educator and contributor to advanced teaching in areas such as conformal field theory and string theory, helping to shape the next generation of mathematical physicists.
Caroline Turnage-Butterbaugh
Carleton College
Zeros of the Riemann zeta-function on the critical line
Abstract
The Riemann Hypothesis (RH) asserts that the complex zeros of the Riemann zeta-function lie on a vertical line known as the critical line. Riemann proposed RH in his groundbreaking 1859 paper, which laid the foundation towards the eventual proof of the Prime Number Theorem. Evidence in favor of RH comes in many forms, including zero-free regions (areas of the complex plane devoid of zeros) and zero-density estimates, which bound the number of zeros which lie more than a fixed distance from the critical line. Recently, significant progress has been made in proving another type of evidence in favor of RH: lower bounds on the proportion of zeros lying on the critical line.
These new advances use a method constructed by Montgomery in 1973 to study the vertical distribution of the zeros under the assumption of RH. In particular, Montgomery proved that, under RH, at least 2/3 of the zeros of the Riemann zeta-function are simple. In recent joint work with Baluyot, Goldston, and Suriajaya, we showed how to remove RH from Montgomery’s theorem, and, upon assuming a much weaker hypothesis than RH, proved that at least 67.25% of the zeros are simple and on the critical line. In August 2026, an unreleased research model of Claude rendered the argument unconditional, and September 2026 Lamzouri provided a new, simplified proof of the unconditional result.
This broadly accessible talk explores the rich landscape of these recent, exciting developments.
Biography
Caroline Turnage-Butterbaugh is an analytic number theorist and associate professor of mathematics at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, USA. Her research concerns analytic aspects of L-functions, including their moments and the vertical distribution of their zeros. She is partially supported by the National Science Foundation under grant NSF CAREER DMS-2239681.
Event Details @ UWA
Located on the banks of the Swan River, the University of Western Australia campus offers a world-class setting for collaboration and discovery. With its mix of heritage architecture, natural beauty, and proximity to Perth’s city centre and coastline, UWA provides an inspiring environment for this year’s conference.
| Event | Date & Time* |
| MathQuEST Day Perth 2026 | Monday, 30 November (All Day) |
| WIMSIG Dinner | Monday, 30 November (Evening) |
| Welcome Reception | Tuesday, 1 December (Evening) |
| Education Afternoon | Wednesday, 2 December (Afternoon) |
| Public Lecture (with Roslyn Hickson) | Wednesday, 2 December (Evening) |
| LGBTQIA+ Lunch | Thursday, 3 December (Lunch) |
| AustMS Annual General Meeting | Thursday, 3 December (Afternoon) |
| Conference Dinner | Thursday, 3 December (Evening) |
AustMS Early
Career Workshop (ECW)
The biennial AustMS Early Career Workshop (ECW) is a full-day event that will be held on Monday 30 November 2026, at The University of Western Australia. This event is intended to support early-career researchers (broadly defined, from commencing HDR students to academics several years post PhD) in meeting peers, developing practical skills, and learning about topics relevant to new academics today.
Further information will be made available closer to the date.
This workshop is supported by an Anne Penfold Street Award, which provides funding for attendees with caring responsibilities. If this applies to you, please indicate upon registration or contact one of the ECW organisers, who can help you with arrangements:
- Alex Tam (Adelaide University)
- Yudhi Bunjamin (University of New South Wales)
- Eugene Tan (University of Western Australia)
Explore Perth, Western Australia
Set in one of the world’s most isolated yet vibrant cities, the conference offers a unique opportunity to experience the natural beauty and relaxed lifestyle of Perth.
- Kings Park and Botanic Garden: One of the largest inner-city parks in the world, Kings Park offers sweeping views of the Perth skyline and Swan River. Delegates can explore native bushland, curated botanical gardens, and walking trails just minutes from UWA.
- Rottnest Island: A short ferry ride from Perth, Rottnest Island is famous for its crystal-clear waters, pristine beaches, and the iconic quokka. It’s an ideal day trip for conference attendees looking to experience Western Australia’s coastal beauty.
- More to Discover
The Swan River foreshore, perfect for walks and riverside dining. Perth’s vibrant CBD, with restaurants, bars, and cultural venues. Nearby beaches such as Cottesloe, known for sunsets over the Indian Ocean
Getting to UWA
By Public Transport
UWA is easily accessible via Perth’s public transport network. Frequent bus services connect the campus with the CBD, Subiaco, and surrounding suburbs, including major routes such as the 950 and CircleRoute services.
By Car
The campus is located at 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley. Parking is available on campus, though spaces can be limited during peak periods, and visitors are encouraged to consider public transport where possible.
By Active Transport
For those staying nearby, UWA is accessible by walking or cycling along the scenic Swan River foreshore, offering a relaxed and picturesque commute to the conference venue.