Citation for Prof Andrew Bassom

Andrew Bassom plays a leading role within ANZIAM, most notably as a a continuing Co-Chief Editor of the Journal from 2010. He was also instrumental in organising two ANZIAM Conferences, the Pillow Trust, and instigating the flourishing Tasmanian branch. Andrew also enthuses high-school students to study mathematics, while regularly setting Year 12 Specialised Maths exam for them since 2005. At the national level, Andrew was a member of the 2018 ERA panel, has sat on the NZ Marsden Fund panel, member of the Committee for Mechanical and Engineering Sciences, is appointed to the ARC College of Experts since 2023, and manages to be President of the South Tasmanian Whale Rescue Group.  

Andrew Bassom's research significantly advances knowledge over a broad swathe of areas, distinguished by over 200 refereed publications in top international journals. Just three example areas are the following. With collaborators he explored the Painleve ODEs to innovatively classify various families of exact solutions and developed new theories to explain some of their properties. Andrew also vortices in oceanography and meteorology, developed theories that discovered winding-up properties and diffusion characteristics in classical vortices which are explained in a sequence of high-cited papers. The stability of oscillating fluid layers was a classic outstanding problem and Andrew and Peter Blennerhassett, via Floquet theory, developed how to establish and characterise its instability.  In other research Andrew has led collaborative, multi-disciplinary teams in applications from the ventilation of premature babies, to the design of open-pit mines, and Antarctic geophysics, and included resolving problems in beer-making. His technical mastery of methods and techniques in applied mathematics has been instrumental in developing advances on many fronts.