The Mathematical Institute Newsletter is maintained by Jan-Hendrik Evertse. In general, the newsletter is issued the first week of each month, except for July and August. This year, there will be no newsletter in June. 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 May 2005 newsletter, such as announcements, personal notes, visits to conferences, guests (with place of origin and date of arrival and departure), lectures of general interest, Ph.D. thesis defenses (with title of thesis), etc. should be sent by e-mail to evertse at math.leidenuniv.nl before April 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

• Marnix Engels wins the VVS Master Thesis prize

  Marnix Engels, a master thesis student of Lodewijk Kallenberg, won the VVS (Dutch Society for Statistics and Operations Research) Master thesis prize for the best thesis, written in 2004 in the area of Statistics and Operations Research. His thesis "Portfolio Optimization: Beyond Markowitz" gives several generalizations of the classical portfolio theory, developed by Markowitz in 1952. For this work Markowitz received the Nobel Prize in 1990. Marnix will receive his prize during the Statistical Day which will be held on April 11 at the Free University Amsterdam.

• General Colloquium lectures on Thursday April 14 in Leiden and April 21 in Delft

  This spring there is a cooperation between the general mathematics colloquia of Delft and Leiden. The following two lectures have been scheduled in April:

  April 14, 4:00-5:00, Leiden, Snellius room 174:
  Arnold Heemink: Filtering algorithms for large scale systems.
  

  April 21, 4:00-5:00, Delft, EWI-gebouw, room D, Mekelweg 4:
  Bas Edixhoven: How fast can one compute Ramanujan's tau-function?

  Forthcoming lectures: Ben de Pagter (May 12, Leiden); Jan-Hendrik Evertse (May 19, Delft); Roger Cooke (June 2, Leiden); Marcel de Jeu (June 16, Delft).
  For further information see http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~evertse/colloquium.shtml.

• Presentation of bachelor diplomas and Traditional Institute Barbecue on Friday June 24

  On Friday June 24 there will be the first presentation of the bachelor diplomas in mathematics. After this presentation, starting at 5:00 pm there will be a barbecue for personnel and students of the Mathematical Institute. The barbecue will be at the inner court opposite to the FooBar. The barbecue will be organized by a group of PhD. students under supervision of Jeanine Daems.
  

Visits/lectures outside our institute

- Christiaan van de Woestijne: On March 2, he gave a lecture in the Combinatorial Theory Seminar of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven.

- Luca Ferracina: From April 4-8 he will attend the International Conference on "High Order Non-Oscillatory Methods for Wave Propagation: Algorithms and Applications" held at the IRST-ITC, Trento, Italy. He will give a lecture on "TVD Runge-Kutta Methods."

- Jan Hogendijk, Hendrik Lenstra and Peter Stevenhagen: From April 7-12 they will visit the House of Mathematics in Isfahan (Iran). This trip is meant as a preparation for a future conference in Isfahan (2007?) on mathematics in relation to the Muslim architecture in Isfahan.

- Reinier Bröker: From April 14-19 he will visit René Schoof in Rome. On April 15 he will give a lecture, titled "Class invariants in a non-archimedean setting."

Technical reports

MI 2005-04		F. den Hollander and J.E. Steif: Random walk in random scenery: A survey of some recent results
MI 2005-05		A. Greven and F. den Hollander: Phase transitions for the long-time behaviour of interacting diffusions
MI 2005-06		N.B. Andersen and M. de Jeu: Elementary proofs of Paley-Wiener theorems for the Dunkl transform on the real line