Gaven Martin


Gaven John Martin FRSNZ FASL FAMS is a New Zealand mathematician. He is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Massey University, the head of the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study, the former president of the New Zealand Mathematical Society, and the editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Journal of Mathematics. He is Vice-President of the Royal Society of New Zealand Mathematical, [Physical Sciences Engineering and Technology. His research concerns quasiconformal mappings, regularity theory for partial differential equations, and connections between the theory of discrete groups and low-dimensional topology.

Education and career

Martin is originally from Rotorua, New Zealand. His family moved to Henderson when he was 11 years old, and he attended Henderson High School and the University of Auckland, earning a BSc with first-class honours in 1980 and an MSc with distinction in 1981. He then went to the University of Michigan on a Fulbright scholarship, completing his doctorate in 1985 under the supervision of Frederick Gehring and earning the Sumner Byron Myers Prize for the best mathematics dissertation in his year and an A.P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship spent in T.U.B. Berlin and The University of Helsinki.
After short-term positions at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute of the University of California, Berkeley and as a Gibbs Instructor at Yale University, Martin became a lecturer at the University of Auckland in 1989, but left after a year to do research at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France.
Soon after his return, he was given a personal chair at Auckland; when he took it he became the youngest full professor in New Zealand.
For the next several years he split his time between Auckland and Australian National University, but by 1996 he gave up the Australian appointment and remained solely at Auckland. He moved to Massey as a distinguished professor in 2005, and in 2016 was elected as the academic staff representative on the Massey University Council, the University's topmost governing body.

Awards and honours

Martin became a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1997. In 2001 he won the James Cook Fellowship of the RSNZ; he also won the Hector Memorial Medal of the RSNZ in 2008. He was an invited speaker at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians.
In 2012, he became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society. He was made a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in 2016.

Selected publications

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