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Mathematician wins fellowship at Swiss institute

January 24, 2006

Bea.thumb.JPGA mathematician from The University of New England has won a post-doctoral fellowship that will allow her to return to Zurich, Switzerland, for research with her original mentor in theoretical physics.

Dr Bea Bleile (pictured here) is a graduate of the world-renowned Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) – an institution that has produced 21 Nobel Prizes. (Nine of them have been in physics, including those of Roentgen, Einstein and Bloch.)

After tutoring and lecturing in mathematics at UNE for the past 12 years, and gaining Master of Science (UNE, 1999) and PhD (University of Sydney, 2005) degrees through part-time study, Dr Bleile will return to Zurich later this year to take up the offer of a post-doctoral fellowship at ETH.

“I’m very excited about the prospect of working again with Professor Jurg Froehlich, who supervised my final-year thesis (in mathematical physics) when I was an undergraduate at ETH,” she said. “Now that I have a doctorate in mathematics, I’m looking forward to getting back to its application in theoretical physics.” (Professor Froehlich, Head of the Department of Physics at ETH, is a distinguished theoretical physicist whose many awards have included the Max-Planck Medal of the German Physical Society.)

Dr Bleile, who grew up in southern Germany only 200 km from Zurich, will be returning to family and friends as well as to her Alma Mater. “ETH is a very exciting place,” she said, “and I feel at home there. Although I’ll be based in Theoretical Physics, I’ll be in touch with the latest developments in mathematics, as the Mathematics Research Institute at ETH is a magnet for the world’s leading mathematicians.”

Another of her mentors is the famous English mathematician Peter Hilton, who was one of the team led by Alan Turing that broke Germany’s secret codes during the Second World War. It was Professor Hilton, during a visit to UNE in 1995, who introduced her to the branch of advanced mathematics known as “homological algebra”, and who encouraged her to pursue this subject in her research and her teaching. She did so, and then turned to the related subject of algebraic topology for her PhD research. “These mathematical techniques are used in theoretical physics,” she said, “and I always had in the back of my mind the idea of one day returning with them to that field. The post-doctoral fellowship is a dream come true.”

Her chief ambition is to bring back to UNE the knowledge and experience she gains in Zurich. “I came to UNE in 1993 because it was a good university with a very good mathematics department of international standing,” she said. “That reputation becomes even more obvious as you travel around Australia and find that people at other institutions take you very seriously. We have had a stream of international visitors in UNE’s School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, and they all comment on the dynamic atmosphere here. I’d like to contribute what I learn to that atmosphere of mathematical adventure.”

Posted by Jim Scanlan at January 24, 2006 04:43 PM