Professor Graeme Wake
Professor of Industrial Mathematics
Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
Since 2003 Graeme Wake has been Professor of Industrial Mathematics at the Auckland campus of Massey University in New Zealand. This position was established in order for the Centre to host ANZIAM’s annual Mathematics-in-Industry Study group for the three years 2004-6. Graeme was Director for those Study Groups on its first migration across the Tasman since its inception in 1984. Previous to that he held positions at the Universities of Canterbury (Christchurch), Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington, as well as at Massey’s original campus in Palmerston North where he was Head of the Mathematics Department in 1989-95. In 2001-2 he was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s All Souls College.
Graeme has published nearly 200 research papers on systems modelling of problems mostly in his primary interests of combustion and biology, using the tools of nonlinear analysis and dynamical systems. Key achievements are the characterisation of spontaneous ignition as a bifurcation and the development of a generic model of the cell cycle. The latter is used to quantify the growth of tumour cells and to quantify the effect of chemical treatment to destroy these cells.
Graeme has been an active member of ANZIAM and its predecessor - the Division of Applied Mathematics. He was involved in its evolution to embrace both countries, and was the founder of the New Zealand Branch in 1994. He served as Chair of ANZIAM in 1995-7 and was the first New Zealander to do so. He was President of the NZ Mathematical Society twice (1979-80 and 1999-2001). In 2004 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and in 2007 will hold a Maclaurin Fellowship of the NZ Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in order to pursue full-time research.
He is a passionate advocate of taking advanced mathematics to work in the wider community and runs an active consulting agency to foster this, taking on ecological, agricultural and engineering problems for clients around the region. This type of activity he believes is essential to the health of mathematics as a discipline world-wide. He works in other countries to help in this area, currently in South Korea where holds a regular visiting appointment.
Interestingly, he grew up on a large sheep station and has (fond?) memories of long horse rides “frozen to the saddle” in NZ’s remote high country as a teenager.
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