Scotch College

Another maths accolade for Chris

Chris Fricke (right) receives an earlier award – the Wyselaskie Scholarship in mathematics, from Professor John McKenzie, the Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne.

A presentation at a recent mathematics conference has won Chris Fricke (’97) a prestigious award. The young PhD student, co-dux of Scotch in 1997, received the T M Cherry Award for the best student talk at the Australian and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ANZIAM) conference in February. Chris spoke about a new mathematical solution to an optimisation problem that arises in open pit mining.

The T M Cherry award is named in honour of one of Australia’s leading scientists and a distinguished Old Scotch Boy, the late Sir Thomas Macfarland Cherry (’14).

As Chris’s PhD supervisor commented: ‘I have seen Chris give many superb talks during his years as an honours, then a PhD student in our department. Although I was not able to witness his talk at ANZIAM, I know that the outstanding quality of his research work, and the consistently excellent standard of his presentations, make him a very worthy recipient of this prize’.

It was another accolade Chris can slot into an already crowded CV. In his final year at Scotch he was a Prefect and played in the 1st XI and 1st XVIII. After achieving a score of 99.95 in the 1997 VCE, he was named co-dux of the School along with Jai Darvall, Mayur Krishnaswamy, Daniel Mathews and Ken Nguyen.

Chris began a Bachelor of Commerce/Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Melbourne in 1998. In 2001 he finished the science component of the course, and completed honours in science (mathematics) in 2002. He commenced his PhD the following year in the University of Melbourne’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

Chris’s thesis, Applications of Integer Programming in Open-Pit Mining, in which he has been sponsored by BHP Billiton, uses a branch of mathematics called operations research to create a long-term production plan for an open-pit mine that maximises profitability, subject to a number of practical constraints.

Chris says that he is still contemplating the career he will pursue once his PhD studies are completed later this year. ‘I’m interested in three areas that would naturally follow on from my studies,’ he told Great Scot. ‘Mining is one obvious choice after the work I’ve done in my PhD thesis, but I’m also considering management consulting or finance and banking.’

Some recent Old Scotch mathematicians

Among other current Old Scotch boy mathematicians are:

Dan Mathews (’97)

Co-dux of the School in 1997 with Chris Fricke; now a PhD student in mathematics at Stanford University in California, USA

Professor Tim Brown (’70)

Dean of the Faculty of Science at the Australian National University in Canberra

Professor Robert Bartnik (’73)

Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University

Associate Professor Ken Harrison (’63)

Associate Professor in Mathematics at Murdoch University in Perth

David Ashton