Irish Mathematical Society

Cumann Matamaitice na hÉireann

BULLETIN Number 40 Easter 1998

ISSN 0791-5578

Contents

• IMS Officers and Local Representatives ......... ii
• Notes on Applying for IMS Membership ......... iii
• Minutes of IMS meeting 23.12.1997 ................... 1
• UCD graduate share top prize ............................ 5

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• Conference Announcements
• Eleventh September IMS meeting ....... 6
• Joint IMS and LMS meeting ....... 7
• Groups in Galway 1998 ....... 8

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• Articles
• The Baer-Specker group .......Eoin Coleman ... 9
• Expressing unipotent matrices over rings as products of involutions ....... Thomas J. Laffey ... 24
• On a comment of Douglas concerning Widom's Theorem ....... Mícheál Ó Searcóid ... 31
• The fundamental group of non-negatively curved manifolds ....... David Wraith ... 35
• On the equation \phi(x^m - y^m) = xⁿ + yⁿ ....... Florian Luca ... 46
• Comments on the Mathfit programme ....... Anthony Karel Seda ... 56
• Chaos: The evolution of a definition ....... Pat Touhey ... 60
• The tethered goat - a calculus approach ....... Michael Brennan ... 71

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• Book Review

  Rings and Fields by Graham Ellis .... Des MacHale ....................75