Bushfires occur regularly during summer in southern Australia, but only a few of these fires become iconic due to their effects, either in terms of loss of life or economic and social cost. Such events include Black Friday (1939), the Hobart fires (1967), Ash Wednesday (1983), the Canberra bushfires (2003), and most recently Black Saturday in February 2009. In most of these events the weather of the day was statistically extreme in terms of heat, (low) humidity, and wind speed, and in terms of antecedent drought. There are a number of reasons for conducting post-event analyses of the meteorology of these events. One is to identify any meteorological circulation systems or dynamic processes occurring on those days that might not be widely or hitherto recognised, to document these, and to develop new forecast or guidance products. The understanding and prediction of such features can be used in the short term to assist in effective management of fires and the safety of firefighters and in the medium range to assist preparedness for the onset of extreme conditions. The results of such studies can also be applied to simulations of future climates to assess the likely changes in frequency of the most extreme fire weather events, and their documentary records provide a resource that can be used for advanced training purposes. In addition, particularly for events further in the past, revisiting these events using reanalysis data sets and contemporary NWP models can also provide insights unavailable at the time of the events. Over the past few years the Bushfire CRC's Fire Weather and Fire Danger project in CAWCR has studied the mesoscale meteorology of a number of major fire events, including the days of Ash Wednesday 1983, the Dandenong Ranges fire in January 1997, the Canberra fires and the Alpine breakout fires in January 2003, the Lower Eyre Peninsula fires in January 2005 and the Boorabbin fire in December 2007-January 2008. Various aspects of these studies are described below, including the structures of dry cold frontal wind changes, the particular character of the cold fronts associated with the most damaging fires in southeastern Australia, and some aspects of how the vertical temperature and humidity structure of the atmosphere may affect the fire weather at the surface. These studies reveal much about these major events, but also suggest future research directions, and some of these will be discussed.

The aim of the Hmm... Sessions is for people to get together to solve puzzles as a group. There will be lots of time to solve puzzles in groups and to celebrate the clever solutions of others. The lunchbreak provides time to socialise, play games or to continue solving puzzles (bring your own lunch, or go out to nearby Rundle Mall to buy lunch on the day).

Hosted by Dr David Butler of the Maths Learning Service, University of Adelaide.

I shall give an overview of recent progress in homological mirror symmetry, both in clarifying our conceptual understanding of how the sign of the canonical bundle affects the behaviour of the mirror, and in obtaining concrete examples where the mirror conjecture has now been verified. (This is a two-hour talk.)

I shall give an overview of recent progress in homological mirror symmetry, both in clarifying our conceptual understanding of how the sign of the canonical bundle affects the behaviour of the mirror, and in obtaining concrete examples where the mirror conjecture has now been verified. (This is a two-hour talk.)

We give an introduction to the use of adjoint equations (and solutions) for numerical error control and solution enhancement of PDEs. In addition, the same equations can be used for optimization routines and uncertainty quantification. We discuss the modification of these methods in the context of operator splitting and to non-variational (e.g. finite volume) methods. Finally, we conclude with an application of the method to the shallow water equations and discuss some of the hurdles that need to be overcome when extending adjoint methodologies to ocean and atmospheric modeling.

I shall give an overview of recent progress in homological mirror symmetry, both in clarifying our conceptual understanding of how the sign of the canonical bundle affects the behaviour of the mirror, and in obtaining concrete examples where the mirror conjecture has now been verified. (This is a two-hour talk.)

I shall give an overview of recent progress in homological mirror symmetry, both in clarifying our conceptual understanding of how the sign of the canonical bundle affects the behaviour of the mirror, and in obtaining concrete examples where the mirror conjecture has now been verified. (This is a two-hour talk.)

I shall give an overview of recent progress in homological mirror symmetry, both in clarifying our conceptual understanding of how the sign of the canonical bundle affects the behaviour of the mirror, and in obtaining concrete examples where the mirror conjecture has now been verified. (This is a two-hour talk.)

Quillen introduced a $K'_0$-theory for possibly nonunital rings and showed that it agrees with the usual algebraic $K_0$-theory if the ring is unital. We shall introduce higher $K'$-groups for $k$-algebras, where $k$ is a field, and discuss some elementary properties of this theory. We shall also show that for stable $C*$-algebras the higher $K'$-theory agrees with the topological $K$-theory. If time permits we shall explain how this provides a formalism to treat topological $\mathbb{T}$-dualities via Kasparov's bivariant $K$-theory.

The Mathematica Seminars 2010 offer an opportunity to experience the applicability, ease-of-use, as well as the advancements of Mathematica 7 in education and academic research. These seminars will highlight the latest directions in technical computing with Mathematica, and the impact this technology has across a wide range of academic fields, from maths, physics and biology to finance, economics and business. Those not yet familiar with Mathematica will gain an overview of the system and discover the breadth of applications it can address, while experts will get firsthand experience with recent advances in Mathematica like parallel computing, digital image processing, point-and-click palettes, built-in curated data, as well as courseware examples.