Blue Hat Prize

Who is the prize awarded to?

The Blue Hat Prize is a prize given to the best talk by a non-student at the Annual Meeting of the AustMS as judged by students.

History

In 2011, the AustMS meeting was at University of Western Australian, directed by David Pask. The organisers wanted locals to be identifiable so they could be asked for directions, etc., David got hats instead of T-shirts. (Great idea!) That year, students decided to take a leaf out of the ANZIAM Cherry Ripe Prize and flip the BH Neumann Prize by judging the ‘best talk by a non-student’. The criteria was not specified. However, shortly before they were due to award the accolade, they realised that they had no prize! David gave them a spare hat and the rest is history.

Rules

The rules for the Blue Hat Prize have generally speaking changed every year but since 2023, they are set in the AAMS Constitution .

2024

In 2024, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Melissa Lee from Monash University for the talk "Computing the anatomy of the Monster". The hat was made at the 7th Australian Mathematical Sciences Student Conference as part of the LGBTQ+ lunch.

2023

In 2023, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Adrian Dudek from the University of Queensland for the talk "Prime numbers in short intervals on Riemman hypothesis". The hat was designed by Matthias Fresacher and contains tetris pieces where students attending the conference  wrote their talk experiences such as, their best talk tip, their worst talk disaster, what not to do, their best talk experience, and so on. Some of the contributions include: 

• If the cant’ understand what you’re saying, they should at least have pretty pictures to look at 

• Fun and informative 

• A good story 

• 1 joke + 1 proof = great talk

2022

In 2022, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Chris Tisdell.  The Blue Hat was made from a cashmerino silk fibre blend from ixchel fibre, this blend is made of 55% 19 micron merino, 40% silk, 5% cashmere. The fibre blend was white and was then hand dyed in an experiment in which the fibre was hung and the dye poured down through it, the blend of white and blue is inspired by the standard white to blue heat bar often used in mathematical visualisations. The fibre was then hand spun  using an ashford traditional spinning wheel using a fractal spinning technique. The fractal spinning involves  splitting the fibre in half spinning one half into a single of yarn, then taking the second half and splitting it again into 2 quarters, you spin one quarter into a second single and split the other quarter in half into eighths, you continue to spin the second single using one of the eighths and continue this pattern of splitting until it is no longer physical viable to splits the fibre and you spin the last bit onto the second single as well. This gives one single that has the dye pattern from the fibre once going from start to of the single of yarn and the second single the has the same pattern but halved and then repeated and halved and repeated again multiple times. These two singles are then plyed (spun) together to create the yarn used for knitting.

The Blue Hat is comprised of 15 faces of an icosahedron (D20), the triangles were knitted one by one with each subsequent triangle knitted on by picking up stitches from 1 or 2 of the existing triangle already knitted. The basic triangle pattern used was from this blog post.

2021

In 2021, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Emily Riehl (this is not 100% confirmed so if you have more information, please do reach out).

2020

In 2020, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Jeffrey Hogan.

2019

In 2019, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Timothy Trudgian.

2018

In 2018, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Bun Burton.

2017

In 2017, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Georgia Benkart.

B.H. Neumann awards, 2017. Left to right: Katherine Seaton, Kate Smith-Miles, Harry Crimmins, Adrianne Jenner, Michael Hallam, Becky Armstrong, Georgia Benkart.

2016

In 2016, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Matthew Kennedy.

2015

In 2015, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Manjul Bhargava.

2014

In 2014, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Nicolas Monod.

2013

In 2013, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Marcel Jackson.

2012

In 2012, the Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Norman Do.

2011

In 2011, the inaugural Blue Hat Prize was awarded to Michael Barnsley.