5th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, ICIAM 2003
Sydney, Australia, 7-11 July 2003

Held every four years, the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics is billed as the leading event in its field, worldwide. With more than 1700 delegates from 60 countries, approximately 1700 presentations, 34 keynote speakers, three special days and five embedded meetings, ICIAM 2003 lived up to its billing.

The subject material for the Congress covered the full spectrum of industrial and applied mathematics. This ranged from presentation on theoretical topics without a practical application in mind through to talks on the application of mathematics in specific industry sectors. Presentations were made in four categories: keynote lectures (by invitation), minisymposia, contributed talks and posters.

ICIAM 2003 featured five embedded meetings:

• 6th Australia-New Zealand Mathematics Convention
• 11th Computational Techniques and Applications Conference
• 6th Engineering Mathematics and Applications Conference
• 17th National Conference of the Australian Society for Operations Research
• 2nd National Symposium on Financial Mathematics

Of these, CTAC and EMAC had approximately 100 and 50 presentations respectively, and the Proceedings will be published. Topics of relevance to engineering and minerals engineering were included in these. For further details, see the “Embedded Meetings” link at www.iciam.org.

The Special Days at ICIAM 2003 were

• Industry Day consisting on 8 Special Technological Workshops, each with four speakers and concentrating on the role of mathematics in specific fields of industry. One of these Workshops was on Minerals and Petroleum and featured the following speakers:
• Ray Shaw, Rio Tinto: Mathematics and Modelling in the Minerals Industry.
• Tim Napier-Munn, Julius Kruttschnitt Minerals Research Centre: The Mythical One Percent - Obstacles to Proving a Process Improvement.
• Mark Cross, Greenwich: Mathematical Modelling of Minerals Extraction Processes.
• Paul Cleary, CSIRO: Application of Large-scale DEM Modelling to Problems in the Mineral Processing Industry.
• Education Day, which was designed to let high school mathematics teachers connect to the latest developments in the discipline, feel part of a vibrant community, and also feel valued for their contribution. The day featured a special program of exhibits and lectures by international stars.
• Community Day, which provided a vehicle for free interchange between the local community and delegates. A highlight on this day was a Community Lecture by Helaman and Claire Ferguson on “Mathematics in Stone and Bronze”.

As mentioned earlier, ICIAM 2003 had approximately 1700 presentations and the program was extremely wide-ranging and comprehensive. Presentations were classified into 22 broad themes, of which the following might be of interest to readers of this report:

10. Fluid Mechanics
11. Solid Mechanics
13. Physical Systems
14. Large-Scale Applications
15. Mathematical Engineering

In all, the abstracts for these classifications occupied approximately 65 pages in the Book of Abstracts, probably about 250 presentations in all. In addition, some of the approximately 250 presentations in the following areas
06. Optimisation
09. Modelling and Simulation
might be of interest.

In summary, ICIAM 2003 was a major scientific meeting, which gave a snapshot of the current state of applied mathematics and its industrial applications. In such a broad program, there were many individual presentations that were concerned with applications in minerals engineering.

For further details, see the Congress web site at www.iciam.org, or contact the undersigned. A detailed report is available on the web site.

Noel Barton, Congress Director, Noel.Barton@csiro.au