Grants & Awards
Staff and students in logic related areas have received the grants and awards listed below.
Direct research grants awarded since 2002 total approximately $13.64 million.
Grants
[A "Marsden grant" is a research grant from the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand.]
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Marsden grant of $712,000 to Noam Greenberg and Dan Turetsky for the project
Connections between Computability Theory, Effective Descriptive Set Theory,
and Geometric Measure Theory, 2024-2026.
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Marsden grant of $718,000 to Noam Greenberg and Dan Turetsky for the project Computability,
Reverse Mathematics, and Effective Descriptive Set Theory, 2021-2023.
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Marsden grant of $718,000 to Rod Downey for the project New initiatives in the Theory of Computation, 2021-2023.
- Marsden grant of $300,000 to Martino Lupini for the project Logic and C*-algebras, 2019-2021.
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Marsden grant of $660,000 to Noam Greenberg for the project Uncountable structures and effective properties, 2018-2020.
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Marsden grant of $630,000 to Max Cresswell and Adrian Rini (PI's) and Ed Mares (AI) for the project The Logic of Ordinary Language, 2018-2020.
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Marsden grant of $565,000 to Rod Downey for the project The Mathematics of Computation, 2017-2019.
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Marsden grant of $345,000 to Adam Day for the project Computability Theory in the Constructible Universe, 2014-2016.
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Marsden grant of $600,000 to Noam Greenberg and Andre Nies (University of Auckland) for the project Randomness,
analysis and reverse mathematics, 2014-2016.
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Marsden grant of $345,000 to Alex Usvyatsov for the project Model theoretic techniques in Banach spaces and combinatorics, 2014-2016.
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Marsden grant of $510,000 to Rod Downey for the project Algorithmic Randomness, Computation and Complexity, 2013-2015.
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Marsden grant of $405,000 to Sebastian Link for the project Constraints on SQL data: Foundations for a data-intensive society, 2012 - 2014.
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Marsden grant of $750,000 to Max Cresswell, Ed Mares and Adriane Rini for the project A Natural History of
Necessity, 2011 - 2013.
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Marsden grant of $250,000 to Rod Downey for an extension of the project Computability, Complexity and
Randomness to a fourth year (2011).
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Marsden grant of $575,000 to Noam Greenberg for the project Randomness, degree theory, higher computability: new interactions,
2010 - 2012.
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Marsden grant of $400,000 to Sebastian Link for the project Cardinality Constraints for XML:
Challenging the Trade-off between Expressiveness and Tractability, 2009 - 2011.
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Marsden grant of $170,000 to Noam Greenberg for the project Computability Theory and its Interactions with Set Theory,
2008 - 2009.
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Marsden grant of $500,000 to Rod Downey for the project Computability, Complexity and Randomness,
2008 - 2010, with an option of extension to a fourth year.
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Marsden grant of $465,000 to Rob Goldblatt and Ed Mares for the project Semantic Analysis of
Substructural Logics, 2006 - 2009.
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Marsden grant of $475,000 to Rod Downey for the project Aspects of Computability and Randomness,
2005 - 2007.
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New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and
its Applications grant of $355,000 for a Logic and Computation research programme directed
by Rob Goldblatt, 2003 - 2006.
This programme included:- A postdoctoral fellowship for Liang Yu.
- Masters scholarships for Ranald Clouston and David Friggens.
- An international Logic and Computation Workshop at Tahuna Beach, Nelson, January 2004.
- A Special Issue of Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, Volume 138, Issues 1-3, Pages 1-222 (March 2006), comprising papers by participants in the programme.
- Marsden grant of $360,000 to Rod Downey for the project Randomness, Computability and Complexity, 2002 - 2004.
Funded Fellowships held at Victoria
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Rutherford Discovery Fellowship to Alexander Melnikov for the project
Applications of modern computability, 2022-2025. ($678,000)
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Rutherford Discovery Fellowship to Martino Lupini for the project
Computing the shape of chaos, 2021-2025. ($800,000)
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Turing Centenary Research Fellowship awarded to Noam Greenberg by the John Templeton Foundation as one of the winners of a
Mind, Mechanism and Mathematics competition (GBP 75,000).
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Rutherford Discovery Fellowship to Noam Greenberg for the project
Effective randomness, lowness notions and higher computability, 2011-2015. ($800,000)
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James Cook Research Fellowship to Rod Downey 2008-2010 ($240,000).
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Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
Rubicon fellowship to Willemijn Vermaat for
postdoctoral research at CLLC, 2006-2008.
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MacLaurin Research Fellowship for 2003 awarded to Rod Downey by the
New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and
its Applications ($150,000).
- Foundation for Research, Science & Technology
Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to Guohua Wu, 2002 -2005.
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Rod Downey's research grants have supported many postdoctoral fellows, including
Michael Moses, Peter Cholak, Geoff LaForte, Richard Coles, Reed Solomon, Walker White, Denis Hirschfeldt, Evan Griffith, Wu Guohua, Joe Miller, Yu Liang, Rebecca Weber, Noam Greenberg, Antonio Montalban, George Barmpalias, Laurent Bienvenu, Asher Kach, Dan Turetsky, Alexander Melnikov, Gregory Igusa, Matthew Harrison-Trainor.
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Noam Greenberg's research grants have supported postdoctoral fellowships for
Dan Turetsky, David Diamondstone, Alexander Melnikov, Benoit Monin, Linda Westrick, Rutger Kuyper
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Victoria University Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to Katalin Bimbo.
Awards and Honours
- Noam Greenberg and Dan Turetsky, together with Andre Nies (Auckland)
were awarded the 2018
Kalman Prize for Best Paper
by the NZ Mathematical Society, for their journal article
Coherent randomness tests and computing the K-trivial sets, by
Laurent Bienvenu, Noam Greenberg, Antonin Kucera, Andre Nies and Dan Turetsky,
J. European Math. Society 18 (2016), 773-812.
This prize is for a single publication of original research,
which may be an article, monograph or book, having appeared within the previous 5 calendar years.
- Rod Downey was awarded the 2018
Rutherford Medal,
the the highest award offered by the Royal Society of NZ at the request of the Government to recognise eminent research.
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Rod Downey and Denis Hirschfeldt received the
2016 Shoenfield Prize (book section) from the Association for
Symbolic Logic, for outstanding expository writing in the field of logic.
This was awarded for their book Algorithmic Randomness and Complexity, Springer 2010.
- Rod Downey was awarded a
Humboldt Prize of EUR 60,000 in December 2016.
-
Alex Usvyatsov and co-authors Itai Ben Yaacov, Alexander Berenstein and C. Ward Henson received the
2013 Shoenfield Prize (article section) from the Association for
Symbolic Logic, for outstanding expository writing in the field of logic.
This was awarded for the article "Model Theory for Metric Structures", published in the book Model Theory with Applications to Algebra and Analysis, Vol. II, (edited by Z. Chatzidakis, D. Macpherson, A. Pillay, and A. Wilkie), Lecture Notes of the London Mathematical Society, No. 350, Cambridge University Press, 2008, 315-427. - Rod Downey was (jointly) awarded the 2014
EATCS-IPEC Nerode Prize
for outstanding papers in the area of multivariate algorithmics.
- Noam Greenberg was awarded the 2013
NZ Association of Scientists Research Medal for outstanding fundamental or
applied research in the physical, natural or social sciences published by a
scientist under the age of 40.
- Rob Goldblatt was awarded the 2012
Jones Medal by the
the Royal Society of NZ, for lifetime achievement in the mathematical sciences.
- Rod Downey was selected to join the inaugural class of
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
-
Adam Day was awarded the 2011 Hatherton Award
of the Royal Society of NZ, for the best
scientific paper by a PhD student at any New Zealand university in Physical, Earth, or
Mathematical and Information Sciences. Adam's award was for his paper
Increasing the Gap between Descriptional Complexity and Algorithmic Probability, which was published in the
Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Vol 363, no. 10, (2011), Pages 5577-5604.
- Adam Day was awarded the 2011
Sacks Prize by the Association for
Symbolic Logic, for the most outstanding doctoral dissertation in mathematical logic world-wide.
Adam's thesis, Randomness and Computability,
was supervised at VUW by Rod Downey.
- Max Cresswell was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ (Nov. 2011)
- Adam Day was awarded a prestigious three-year
Miller Research Fellowship,
to be held at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the Berkeley campus of the
University of California. These fellowships are intended for "exceptional young scientists of
great promise".
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Rod Downey and co-authors Denis Hirschfeldt, Andre Nies, and Sebastiaan Terwijn received the
2010 Shoenfield Prize (article section) from the Association for
Symbolic Logic, for outstanding expository writing in the field of logic.
This was awarded for the paper Calibrating randomness, published in The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 12, no. 3 (September 2006), pp. 411--491. - Noam Greenberg received the 2009
Hamilton Memorial Prize of the Royal Society of NZ,
awarded annually for the encouragement of beginners in scientific or technological
research in New Zealand or in the islands of the South Pacific Ocean.
- Victoria University Research Excellence Award to Rod Downey 2009.
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Laurent Bienvenu received the 2008
Gilles Kahn thesis prize,
awarded yearly by the French Academy of Sciences and the the "Specif" association for the best
PhD thesis of the year in France in computer science. Laurent's thesis is entitled
Game-theoretic characterizations of randomness: unpredictability and stochasticity.
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Fellowship of the Association for Computing Machinery awarded to Rod Downey 2007,
for contributions to computability and complexity theory.
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NZ Mathematical Society Early Career Award to Noam Greeenberg 2007,
for his discovery of new natural definable classes which capture the dynamics of constructions arising from computability theory, his studies of real-valued measures on the continuum and his use of delicate inductive arguments to exhibit links between high compressibility and low computational power.
- Victoria University Research Excellence Award to Rob Goldblatt 2007.
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The 2006 Hatherton Award
of the Royal Society of NZ to Catherine McCartin, for the best
scientific paper by a PhD student at any New Zealand university in Physical, Earth, or
Mathematical and Information Sciences. Catherine's award was for her paper
Parameterized Counting Problems, which was published in the
Special Issue
of Annals of Pure and Applied Logic devoted to the NZIMA Logic and Computation programme
(see above).
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The 2003 Hatherton Award of the Royal Society of NZ to Guohua Wu, for the best scientific paper
by a PhD student at any New Zealand university in Physical, Earth, or
Mathematical and Information Sciences. Guohua's award was for his paper
Isolation and Lattice Embeddings, which was published in
The Journal of Symbolic Logic,
vol 67 (2002), pp 1055-1064.
- Victoria University Medal for Academic Excellence to
- Simon Doherty as the top VUW student graduating from the BA(Honours) degree in 2001.
- Stephanie Reid as the top VUW student graduating from the BSc(Honours) degree in 2001.
Student Scholarships to VUW
- Top Achiever Doctoral
Scholarship awarded to Adam Day for 2008-2011 by the Tertiary
Education Commission
- Marsden Fund PhD scholarship awarded to Galym Akishev 2006-2009.
- Victoria University Postgraduate Scholarships awarded to:
- Katherine Arthur, PhD
- Michelle Porter, MSc
- Michael McInerney, PhD
- Michael Kane, PhD
- Andrew Fitzgerald, PhD
- Adam Day, PhD
- Michael Kane, MSc
- Frieder Lempp, PhD
- Keng Meng Ng, PhD
- David Friggens, PhD
- Simon Doherty, PhD
- Beate Elsner, MA
Student Scholarships Abroad
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Lisa Fulford (BSc Honours in Logic and Computation 2007) was awarded a
HSP Huygens Scholarship funded by The Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, to study for
an MSc in Logic (specializing in Logic & Mathematics) at the University of Amsterdam.
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Luke McCrohon (BSc Honours in Logic and Computation 2006) was awarded a
Monbukagakusho Scholarship by the the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science
and Technology to study for a Masters in Computational Linguistics at the University of Tokyo.
- Woolf Fisher Scholarship awarded to Ranald Clouston (MSc in Logic and Computation 2004) for PhD research at the Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University, UK.