He's not a household name here but when Gaven Martin heads offshore, he’s feted. Massey University’s distinguished professor of mathematics, whose CV reads like a who’s who of top universities including Yale, Berkeley, Michigan and ANU, recently became the first New Zealand-based academic to give the prestigious Taft lectures in the US. Martin, who is also the founding director of Massey’s Institute for Advanced Study, reckons New Zealand should be doing more to support academics because their theoretical work will one day underpin world-changing technology.
What does a pure mathematician do?
I look at structures of things, try and understand how they work, what they do, how we can model them and then how we can use these processes in other fields.
If you come to make a drug for a pharmaceutical company, what do you do? You just try out drugs and see what works, right? But if you actually understand the processes and mathematically model it, there’s a chance that you can say ‘I need to do this sort of thing to achieve that sort of outcome’. Or, if you build a bridge you want to know some things about the tensile strength, what sort of load the structure can bear. Those things are mathematically modelled, and that has been done for hundreds of years. I’m further up the food chain, or further down the food chain depending on how you look at it, because I’m just trying to understand these and much more sophisticated things mathematically.
How did you get started in pure maths?
It was the path of least resistance. I was just good at it.
You could say you’re doing ‘blue sky’ research?
Blue sky is a maligned term these days, so maybe a better term would be ‘not yet applied’ research. If you look at any modern piece of technology that was in a lab 10 years ago, before that it was on somebody’s whiteboard. It’s all part of a process, and we need mathematicians just as we need anything to build the infrastructure. The stuff that I’m talking about today, some of it won’t have applications; it’ll just fall aside and die. Some of it may have profound applications. Don’t forget it was mathematicians building the first computers in the basements of universities 60 years ago — what’s that technology worth now? It’s a matter of taste and good luck to try and direct your research into those sorts of things. You just never really know where a good idea is going to come from.
When I was a PhD student I spent six months in Helsinki. Finland was a very different country to what it is now. The forestry industry had collapsed and they were looking around for a model to follow to change their economy. Then Nokia came along, originally making great gumboots and working in the forestry industry, and when they decided to move into IT and technology, what did they find? They found the University of Helsinki system and Helsinki University of Technology, filled with creative people working in areas they were interested in. The rest is history. It [Nokia] is a third of the Finnish economy now.
What’s the value of maths in everyday life?
I don’t give a shit whether you can integrate xsin(x). What I care about is if you are presented with a problem, that you can logically analyse it. Extract the good ideas, leave the irrelevant stuff alone and work towards a solution.
Are we doing enough to support ‘not yet applied’ research?
We invest a lot of money in technology that can be seen: biotech, agriculture and so forth. But I don’t think those are the transformational things that will drive New Zealand into a different place. If there’s a piece of IP or a development that you can see on the horizon, then you can bet that most other nations have seen it. The entire venture capital market in New Zealand is what, 100 million bucks? That’s chicken feed to the US. They will have 10 venture capitalists spending the money to try and get to the same place. It’s the ideas not yet seen that are going to be the key, and that’s where we have the opportunity. New Zealand doesn’t have enough respect for smart, smart people. I look around the boardrooms of New Zealand’s big companies and it’s basically the same old suits with the same old ideas. Why do you need seven or eight accountants on the board of a large company? They all think the same way. How the hell is that going to revolutionise our economy? Sure you need the accountants to take a governance role, do those sorts of things, but where are the really smart people who might take the opportunity to do things a different way? To generate the unexpected idea that underpins new technology and business? If you look around New Zealand almost all our businesses are based on one key idea. So how valuable is one idea?
Why did you return to New Zealand?
I was a pure mathematician, and it was easier to find a new job than it was to find a new wife! Nah, I talked about it with a bunch of different people before deciding to come back to New Zealand. I think the opportunity is there for people to achieve things. But, by and large, we have crap political leadership. The ‘knowledge wave’ of the mid-1990s just seemed to come and go.
The number-eight fencing wire mentality just drives me absolutely nuts. The world has moved on. There’s a scale. Some of it’s great, too much of it’s really bad, and I think we’ve had too much. It’s the sort of mentality that gets builders thinking they can be architects and designers, so we get all sorts of shonky structures going up all over the place. We miss the synergy or great people working together, each doing what they’re best at.
How can we improve our R&D performance?
I think first we need to invest more in education, up and down the whole length of the system. Our whole economy could change if we had more educated people in it. The government will claim it’s investing lots of money in education, but paying the interest off student loans doesn’t seem to me to be a really good investment for the country going forwards.
Our performance in R&D is pretty woeful, well below OECD averages. I’ve spent a lot of time in Sweden, where they have big-scale research institutes just for mathematicians set up. It’s difficult to see, ultimately, what you get out of these things. You try and put a dollar value on it and you’re going to get stumped every time, wondering if it’s worth it. But you have to be more careful of how you place value on these things; that’s part of the knowledge infrastructure that these countries try and generate.
No one out there is going to save New Zealand because it’s a green place — we have to do it ourselves. It seems to me we’re heading to be Fiji with cows. Why would you want to be part of that? Smart New Zealanders are voting with their feet. We’ve never had the debate about how big this country should be. Three or 4 million people leads to a nice lifestyle, but it is never going to generate the sort of economy that we need to be a wealthy nation. Let’s have that debate, let’s see what we can do with more people, or fewer people.