Discrete Mathematics

A proud day as Afsane Ghafari graduates with her PhD. Just a shame that it’s not possible for her parents to come from Iran to be here to witness the occasion. But at least her academic father was there!

Welcome to new PhD student, Jeffrey Santrio, who will work on decomposition thresholds of graphs, supervised by Daniel Horsley.

Sophia Witham has won big at the Faculty of Science baking competition. Her 5x5x5 Latin cube made from 125 subcakes in 5 different flavours (chocolate, raspberry, lemon, carrot and red velvet) won both the mathematics prize and the people’s choice awards. A spectacular work — and believe me it tasted just as great as it looked! I’m really looking forward to her 4-dimensional hypercube in next year’s competition!!!

The group will be well-represented at the Canadian Discrete and Algorithmic Mathematics Conference (CanaDAM) in June next year. Daniel Horsley is an invited speaker and organiser of an invited minisymposia “Graph Decompositions and Designs”, and David Wood is a co-organiser of an invited minisymposia “Structural Graph Theory”, while Ian Wanless is on the program committee.

Huge congratulations to Dr Carly Bodkin, whose PhD thesis entitled “The combinatorics of binary matrices” has just been officially passed. The referees were impressed with the thesis and recommended it be passed with only minor corrections.

Carly was supervised by Ian Wanless.

Following the MATRIX workshop, we are hosting several visitors this week: Vida Dujmovic (Ottawa), Gwenael Joret (ULB Brussels), Piotr Micek (Krakow), Freddie Illingworth (UCL London).

This week several group members are at the MATRIX workshop Global Structure and Geometry of Graphs in Creswick. A stellar cast of international researchers are attending.

Massive congratulations to Jack Allsop whose 2025 PhD Thesis “Latin Subrectangles” has been awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Commendation for Thesis Excellence. His thesis was supervised by Ian Wanless.

Welcome to the following new PhD students in the discrete maths group:

• Raj Kaul (from Monash Uni, structural graph theory, supervised by David Wood)
• Neel Kaul (from Monash Uni, structural graph theory, supervised by David Wood)
• Nivedita Tewary (from Uni Auckland, New Zealand, supervised by Ian Wanless)
• Sophia Witham (from Uni Canterbury, New Zealand, supervised by Ian Wanless)

Congratulations to Carly Bodkin, who today submitted her PhD thesis entitled “The Combinatorics of Binary Matrices”. Her thesis was supervised by Ian Wanless.

Due to serious health issues it’s been a long and difficult journey to this point. But persistence is now reaping its sweet reward. A huge achievement!!