The Mathematical Institute Newsletter is maintained by Jan-Hendrik Evertse. The newsletter will be issued the first week of each month, except for July and August. The electronic version of the newsletter can be found on
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~evertse/newsletter.shtml
(go to the homepage of the Mathematical Institute and click on "Newsletter").

Copy for the newsletter of April, such as announcements, personal notes, visits to conferences, guests, lectures of general interest, should be sent by e-mail to evertse@math.leidenuniv.nl before March 27. Copy should be submitted in English plaintext, so that it can be inserted into the newsletter without time consuming typing or translating work.

Agenda and announcements

• Presentation of the 2002 Faculty of Sciences Education Awards on Wednesday March 12
   
  The annual presentation of the prizes for the best teachers in the faculty of sciences will take place on Wednesday March 12, 4:00 pm, in lecture hall C1 of the Gorlaeus laboratory.

• Workshops and study weeks at the Lorentz Center
   
  March 3-7: Onderwijsweek Stabiliteitsanalyse in PDV's
  March 17-28: Workshop mathematical understanding of complex patterns in the life sciences

• General Colloquium
   
  Thursday March 13, 4:00 pm, room 174
  Dr. H. Matzinger (Universität Bielefeld): Some Ideas in Scenery Reconstruction

Personal notes

• New employees (permanent faculty):
   
  

  - Dr. Sander C. Hille (ud), per May 1, 2003, research group Analysis (Prof.dr. S.J. Verduyn Lunel)

• Other:
   
  - Per March 1, Rachel van der Waal will take care of the student administrations of both Mathematics and Computer Science. In the mornings (8:30 am -12:30 pm) she will work for the LIACS (Computer Science Department) and in the afternoons (1:00-5:00 pm) for the Mathematical Institute.
   
  - Per March 1, Rob van der Lee (head of the Faculty of Sciences Service Center) will retire. His duties will be taken over by Herman Stout, Gorlaeus Laboratory, tel. 4584, h.stout@fwnfsc.leidenuniv.nl.

Guests

• Guests of Prof.dr. S.A. van de Geer:
   
  - Vladimir Konakov (Academy of Sciences, Moscow) will visit our institute from February 1 till the end of April. He will work with Prof. van de Geer on nonparametric models for dependent data and approximations by diffusions.
  - Bineeta Adityan (Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam) will visit our institute from February 1-June 1. Prof. Adityan will work with Prof. van de Geer on classification theory.

• Guest of Prof.dr. S.J. Edixhoven:
   
  - Ariane Mezard (Orsay, France) will visit our institute from February 1- July 31. She works in Arithmetic Algebraic Geometry.

Working visits/visits to conferences

- Bas Edixhoven and Peter Stevenhagen will be in California from March 20-April 5 for the Lenstra Treurfeest in Berkeley and the AIM workshop Future directions in algorithmic number theory in Palo Alto.
-Bart de Smit will visit the Physics Department Colloquium MIT (March 13), the AMS Sectional Meeting Baton Rouge (March 14-16), the university of California at Berkeley (March 17-20), the Lenstra Treurfeest in Berkeley (March 21-23) and Matematica e Cultura 2003 in Venice (March 28-29).

Technical reports

MI 2003-02		B. Heidergott and A. Hordijk: Taylor series expansions for stationary Markov chains
MI 2003-03		J.J. Goeman, S.A. van de Geer, F. de Kort, H.C. van Houwelingen: A global test for association of a group of genes with a clinical outcome
MI 2003-04		J.V. Chaparova, L.A. Peletier, S.H. Tersian: Existence and Nonexistence of nontrivial solutions of fourth and sixth order ordinary differential equations
MI 2003-05		S.A. van de Geer: Adaptive quantile regression
MI 2003-06		B. van de Rotten, S. Verduyn Lunel: A limited memory Broyden method to solve high-dimensional systems of nonlinear equations

Doctoral exams

- M. Kardal
Time/place: Tuesday March 11, 4:00 pm, room 409
Specialization: Statistics
Master's Thesis: Betrouwbaarheidsonderzoek schattingsmethode NEH-systeem
Supervisor: Prof.dr. S.A. van de Geer