Prof.
John Butcher intervews Britta
Basse (now at Canterbury)
on her work on modelling endangered
kiwi and kokako populations and cancer cell lines.
John: Tell me where did you begin your maths education?
Britta: Well I didn't think too much about maths until I got to the sixth form and I had a really wonderful maths teacher and that really is the turning point in my life. Up till then I was enjoying it but I wasn't really concentrating on my schoolwork - I had my mind on other things.
It's very important isn't it to have someone who will point the way ahead for you ... so the enjoyable time at school led on to a mathematics degree?
In a roundabout way. What happened is that I had a wonderful maths teacher and suddenly my marks jumped up. We had a term test and I thought I had failed but when we got the marks back I was top of the class and I was absolutely astounded and the boys called me "scholar" and that was my nickname ... and I was so proud of it ... laughs ... I'd got their attention ...
Nobody knows what their abilities are ... you can't judge yourself can you?
I mean how bizarre to think I'd failed when I got top of the class ... looking at it now it just seems mad, but I guess I had no confidence in it really ... but what happened was I got a one for mathematics, I was incredibly proud of it, but I left school after that, because I wanted to work and get enough money for a boat so I could row which I did and worked in a stockbrokers, but I realized working in a stockbrokers wasn't going to get me anywhere in life and I decided to come to university and I enrolled in maths papers.
So what was the gap between leaving high school and coming here ...
One year. I missed out in the seventh form year which actually put me quite a bit behind when I came to stage one. I had Ramankutty for stage one calculus and I found his lectures very demanding
... so getting into a maths training is partly a matter of language and vocabulary isn't it as well as the technical details ...
yes the idea of going into an abstract thing is probably something that people have trouble doing ... people who are not mathematicians tend to think that maths is adding and subtracting and they don't realize there is more to it than that ... theoretical ideas ...
... so the fact that you missed out in a year of high school, did that slow down your course ...
Oh I was definitely behind. I think I managed to get an A in stage one algebra, but I struggled in calculus, I really did, and I missed out a lot ... it wasn't really until I taught those stage one classes that I was really happy with all that work ... I went right through and in stage three topology I remember being happy with it, but some of the core things in stage 1 papers I didn't have ... I didn't have that basic knowledge and that put me behind, but I managed to get through it.
When did you first go into applied mathematics?
Not really until I did my masters in pure mathematics and then I did tutoring and lecturing for a year and went overseas for a year ... and then came back and it wasn't really till I was out at Tamaki and talking to Graeme [Wake] in my masters. I did things like chaos and fractals and I always thought this was just lovely , the little pictures I generated. I definitely liked the idea of being able to SEE the mathematics and I still do and being able to apply it ... you know I definitely like that ...
... with the industrial mathematics emphasis?
No it wasn't that, it was bio-mathematics ... the project that Graeme had for me was the kiwi project and I really enjoyed that ... that was population modelling ... I often felt that the mathematics couldn't do enough ... I wanted to ... because we didn't have the data, you know, to check it , but I really liked the idea that you could use it to maybe ...
... that you could use mathematics to describe things that happen in nature ...
yes ... we had a population broken down by an age structure ... it was nice ...
So you did your master thesis in population?
No it was in pure ... I did papers and a project with Joel Schiff on looking at chaos and fractals, which I enjoyed ... that was just one or two papers I think. It wasn't until I started my Ph.D. that I got into the bio-mathematics.
Where did you begin your Ph.D.?
In Tamaki campus in 1996
Did you finish it while Graeme was still here?
No in 1997 I transferred down to Canterbury and continued it there and finished it and graduated I think in 2000
It's very important for a Ph.D., not just the topic, but to have a mentor who will guide you ...
... for me at least I think. I would have someone to advise me ... Graeme's been a very good [mentor]
the continuity of that advice was more important than the continuity of the place where you were working ...
Oh definitely ... my supervisors on occasions have all been in different parts of the world and just to have contact with e-mail ... it's not easy but its still possible and to get that feedback ...
Kiwi and their distribution, Kokako (DOC)
Tell me a little bit about this kiwi project ...
My co-supervisor was John McClennon and he works with Landcare Research and they've got a hut on Lake Waikaremoana and they've got a few kiwis that they've tagged and they were trying to find out what the predation rates needed to be reduced to and what sized area they needed to eradicate of pests to ensure survival of the species ...
There are particular predators?
Yes stoats
They're the key trouble?
Yes down on that place ... they devastate the population and they've found out that ... what we really gave them was a confirmation of what they really knew I guess to a certain extent, but they were able to publish it in a much more formal way which was quite nice for them.
So the original work was empirical but you tried to model it and give it a mathematical spin?
Yes that's right and we were able to give them an idea of areas that they would have to eradicate of pests from a mathematical point of view ... they knew they weren't eradicating a big enough area to ensure survival of the whole group but they wanted to have a mathematical formula for the relation so they could say "look here it is on paper" ... here's the systematic approach of what we got and the conclusion is that the area needs to be bigger and all the rest of it.
The empirical approach isn't adequate because you have to actually let the population get wiped out to get a certain point on the graph don't you ...
Yes that's right.
You really have to work with things where the population is viable and extend the boundary of that using mathematical modelling ...
Yes ... we've done some other work with the North Island kokako and with that we looked at different management strategies and once again it's something they could never have put into practice because they could never try to put in management strategies because they don't have enough birds and they don't have enough time ... so we were able to model it and show that for the previous five years this is what they've got ... yes it does agree with their model and extend it out ... five or ten years and looks at different possible management strategies.
and it's possible to verify the model from observations
Yes from previous observations and of course its an ongoing thing ...
... the model will get refined with more information ...
... yes definitely ... the modelling with endangered species is always really hard because you don't have a big sample size, you got a tiny sample size, so it is very hard to verify the model, but often they've got a gut feeling of what's happening ... and here is me ... I've never seen a kokako before and I was able to go back to them and say this is what's happening to your population and they would say "yeah well that's actually true".
The most difficult thing at the beginning must be the communication between the field scientist and the mathematician ...
That's something I really have enjoyed actually because they're kind of really real people and they can come back and say ... "no you can't have that in your model ... that's just not how it is ... you've got to do this and it sort of bounces backwards and forwards and that's a really nice way to set up a model
It's living in two quite different cultures isn't it really ...
and they've really enjoyed it as well because it has highlighted to them the things they really need to concentrate on, like I've said to them for example "You really need to tell me the hatching rates of birds" and sometimes they haven't really had that information for years when they've had pest control and so I've said "You have to do that this year" and they've really concentrated on finding out recruitment rates ...
... and so the vital role mathematics has played in this is it can tell the field managers where to put their resources to get the most benefit ...
That's right ... with the kokako one question they really wanted to ask was can they do pulsed management .. do they have to have pest eradication continually or can they do two years on two years off ... and we proved mathematically that the population will still survive if they pulse it and that's really important for them to know because then they don't have to put resources in all the time and they can tell their managers you don't have to do pest eradication every year ... I mean pest eradication has negative side effects on the rest of the environment, you can imagine with poisons ...
it's a question of balancing the good against the damage it does ...
Yes
Britta, would you encourage young people to go into mathematics these days?
Oh yes definitely ... I think it's really important ... I think if you are in school and you get a good maths mark that gives you a foot in the door to lots and lots of different possible careers ... people are really impressed by a good maths result ...
... but you've been lucky getting into this interesting environmental area but people who don't do that but just study mathematics for its own sake which you did to some extent didn't you ...
... but I've really used all those tools that I've gained ... it's been absolutely critical ...the work that I'm doing at the moment .. the abstract stuff has now come in so many times into different parts of my research ... at the moment the cell growth stuff that I'm doing, I've got a foot in every door I've ever been in just about. It's an optimization problem so I'm looking at optimization and then separation of variables looking at PDEs numerical methods ... all sorts of stuff ... even semi-group theory ... at the moment I'm revisiting functional analysis ... and spectral analysis ...
Well that's interesting ... my question was aimed at something slightly different .. that is that people who study mathematics per se, not necessarily for applications ... do they have a miserable life ... what do you think??
You'll have to ask them !! I've always really liked the pure mathematics. I think it's lovely , I find it fascinating ... I think there is always a place for pure mathematics ... there has to be because when you're applying it you draw on all that stuff ... you mean for the sake of it? ... yes of course ... I mean that's like reading literature ... if you read fiction or non-fiction or whatever .. when I was at primary school our motto was "knowledge is strength" and I think learning for the sake of learning is lovely - great!
Having said that I must say that as a person I'm glad that I am able to apply it ... I'm motivated by that but I have no problem with people just studying maths for the sake of it and you never know where it's going to end up ... I've seen lots of examples where people are doing this pure stuff and it is taken by an applied person and used to effect.
After I finished my Ph.D. I got a post-doc at the University of Canterbury and I've been looking at cell lines and we originally had a model for cell growth in plants and animals but its moved to looking at human melanoma cell lines and we're working in conjunction with people up at the Medical School and they have these melanoma cell lines in their flask in the fridge and they add chemicals and different anti-cancer agents and they look at what happens to the cells and we're trying to model that and that work is really really interesting ... and that's another foot in the door ...
... so really you're into medical work now ...
Yes I'm still occasionally doing the contract work but the post-doc is the medical work.
... but you are using the same skills in both projects ...
Yes they use similar conservation equations and that's the nice thing about mathematics too that you have this underlying structure that you can apply to a lot of different fields.
I understand you have a family Britta, your husband and children, and that must be a bit of a problem in allocating your time to the different things that are important to you
Yes definitely ... my husband is doing a Ph. D. in electrical engineering and we combine our time and work at night and put the children three mornings a week into a creche and so we manage it but I must say that I wouldn't be able to take on many more responsibilities than I have at the moment ...
... so you have a common interest in scholarship which can help any competition for time ...
Yes
Do you think your children will become mathematicians?
I don't know. I would just like to support them in whatever they want to be ... my daughter is four and she can already count to a hundred with a few glitches ...
Were your family 'terribly disappointed' you became a mathematician?
No my mother was delighted we went to university ... I started in the same year as my mother and we all went through. ...