The Engine of The New New Zealand

Taking maths to the world

At seven years old Gaven Martin was already challenging his teacher’s calculations of how fast the earth orbited the sun. His teenage years saw him hotwiring cars with his girlfriend – now wife and Associate Professor in Ecology.

His career could have gone one of two ways...

Luckily for the scientific world, he chose mathematics. A good choice for him, and for New Zealand.
Since then he has fast-tracked his career through becoming an Ivy-League associate professor and New Zealand’s youngest-ever professor (at the age of 32), to one of the world’s top mathematicians. He’s received very many awards and grants, both national and international, for his work. He is not just a New Zealand mathematical treasure, but a global one.

Gaven Martin

Distinguished Professor,
Mathematics
Massey University.

Big Bang reality

Gaven Martin’s mathematical brilliance and comic book geekiness would have seen him fit right into the Big Bang Theory.

He’s more of a Leonard than a Sheldon though, living proof that being clever doesn’t mean you have to spend all your spare time at your desk working out complicated formulae. He did read the Scientific American from his school library, but he also read around 30-40 comic books a week. That’s a pretty good daily average! Intersperse that with a bit of hotwiring and racing slot cars and he just might be the most down-to-earth genius you’ll meet.

His route to brilliant mathematician and academic wasn’t a given. Although Gaven showed an aptitude for maths from a really early age, his parents both came from big families of 11 and 12. Out of nearly sixty cousins he was the first in the extended family to go to university.

But he did, and today he’s right up there with the world’s best. He’s earned enough international accolades, medals, been made a member of prestigious international societies and has made breakthroughs that put him up there with the world’s best mathematicians today. And he lives in Auckland.

We don’t have enough room to list all of Gaven’s awards, honours and accolades here. Suffice to say his CV includes appointments at some of the top universities in the world – Yale, Berkeley, Michigan and ANU, the awards and fellowships come from all around the world – the USA, Italy, France, Germany, Scandinavia, the Middle East …

Now the technical part. Today his research interests include non-linear analysis, elliptic partial differential equations and geometric function theory, particularly as it interacts with conformal geometry, quasiconformal mappings and their generalisations. He also works in low dimensional topology and geometry and a bit of geometric group theory. Quite a broad spectrum really.

About mathematics

Pretty much every element of our modern lives are underpinned by mathematical understanding and analysis. From simple things like the laser used in your CD player and the properties of LCD displays and vehicle routing, to the high end image reconstruction technology used in sophisticated medical scanning equipment.

From the sophisticated number theory algorithms which underpin privacy and security in our banking industry, through stochastic modeling in economics, to the analysis of complicated systems of equations in fluid dynamics to model the climate, study and predict earthquakes and other phenomena.

And every day mathematics is becoming even more fundamental to today’s technology-driven world.

Find out more about mathematics

Get started!

If you want to follow in Gaven’s footsteps or just want to learn more about what he does all day, check out our Area of Interest page for Mathematics.

There you’ll learn more relating to what Mathematics is really all about, what kinds of careers you can get in that field, and how Massey University can help you get started down that path – just like Gaven.

New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study

New Zealand earning a Nobel Prize? It’s not out of the question, and it’s definitely on the agenda of the elite scientists that make up the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study.

The Institute is made up of professors that are world-leaders in their field: Distinguished Professor Paul Rainey in evolutionary genetics, Professor Marti Anderson in statistics, Professor Joachim Brand and Professor Victor Flambaum in theoretical physics, Distinguished Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger in theoretical & computational chemistry, Professor Thomas Pfeiffer in computational biology, Professor Sergej Flach in complex systems, and Distinguished Professor Gaven Martin in mathematics.

New Zealand has the intellectual capacity and creativity to develop and lead the world, in all sorts of endeavours. The Institute is about putting a formal name to that, and pushing to achieve the highest accolade that exists for that work.

The NZIAS aims to be unlike any other academic institution in New Zealand. For many hundreds of years science has been organised within disciplines – for example ecologists working with ecologists or mathematicians collaborating with mathematicians. In the Institute for Advanced Study the traditional mould is broken. It brings together top people from disparate fields to see what breakthroughs can arise.

It’s a case of let’s put them together and see what happens.

It could be YOU

The Institute is also about developing the next generation of scholars so that New Zealand is best able to advance at a scientific and economic level. That means that if you study at Massey University, you get access and encouragement from some of the leading minds in their fields.

Each of the professoriate is a world-leader in his/her respective field. This provides huge opportunity, both for each to pursue their research and for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to aspire to study with the professoriate.

It’s not just about excellence at Massey, it’s about international prestige for New Zealand as a whole. With scholars such as these on our side, it’s a goal well within our reach.