Hello everyone, and welcome to ANZIAM 2026.
I’m Andrew Leigh, Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities & Treasury. I would have loved to be with you in person, but parliament is sitting this week – which is rather like an optimisation problem solved in real time. The constraints are real, the objective function evolves as new information arrives, and convergence takes patience.
Still, I’m delighted to welcome you to Canberra – a city that is sometimes described as discrete rather than continuous, highly structured, and with a surprising amount of empty space between nodes. In other words, a place many of you will feel instantly at home.
I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which you’re meeting, and to pay my respects to all First Nations attendees.
This is the 62nd ANZIAM conference, and Canberra has hosted you before – which suggests either that Canberra is a stable fixed point of the ANZIAM conference map, or that the basin of attraction is larger than it looks. Given the program this week, I’m confident someone here could tell us which.
Looking at the abstracts, what struck me is just how broad and unapologetically applied this conference is. In the next few days you’ll move from malaria modelling to distributed convex optimisation, from groundwater clogging to vegetation patterns in drylands, from high‑dimensional networks to the fluid mechanics of your morning coffee. It’s a reminder that applied mathematics is the connective tissue of much of modern life.
If Canberra has a comparative advantage, it’s that we’re a city where models don’t stay abstract for long. Policy is essentially an exercise in applied maths with noisy data, awkward boundary conditions, and agents who do not optimise in the way the textbook promised they would. I note with interest that one of your plenaries is on the emergence of bias in learning agents. I regret to say that some learning agents in politics manage to acquire bias even without starting from tabula rasa.
There’s also something pleasing about hosting a conference with sessions on optimisation, uncertainty, and identifiability in a city built around roundabouts. The national capital is proof that local minima exist, that path dependence is real, and that the shortest route is rarely the one actually taken.
I’m especially glad to see the strong presence of students and early‑career researchers in the program. The T. M. Cherry Student Prize has a long history, and if past years are any guide, today’s student talks are tomorrow’s plenaries – after enough revisions, rejections, and the occasional reviewer who appears to believe your model should have been solved analytically in closed form.
ANZIAM has always been distinctive in keeping one foot firmly in industry, government, and real‑world problems. That matters. Whether you’re modelling epidemics, climate systems, infrastructure, or financial risk, the work you do shapes decisions well beyond the seminar room. As someone who relies heavily on modelling and evidence in public policy, I can say this with certainty: when the maths is good, it genuinely changes outcomes.
So I hope you enjoy the next few days – the talks, the questions, the arguments over coffee about whether something is really non‑Markovian, or just Markovian in a larger state space. I hope you find time to explore Canberra too. If you get lost, remember: all roads eventually lead back to Northbourne Avenue, usually via an unnecessary detour.
Thank you to Simon Watt and the organising committee for pulling together such a rich program, and thank you to all of you for being part of a community that keeps proving that mathematics is not only beautiful, but useful.
Welcome to ANZIAM 2026, and welcome to Canberra.