Discrete Mathematics

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!!

Congratulations to Marc Distel who has submitted his PhD thesis entitled “Global Structure of Minor-Free Graphs and Beyond” (supervised by David Wood). Marc’s candidature has been a tremendous success, producing 16 papers, including publications in Advances in Combinatorics; Combinatorics, Probability & Computing; Electronic J. Combinatorics; Innovations in Graph Theory; and SIAM J. Discrete Math. The thesis is based on five single-authored papers within the themes of coarse graph theory and graph product structure theory, which have been hot topics in structural graph theory over the past few years.

Update (18th May): Marc’s thesis has been accepted with no revisions. Both examiners rated it as exceptional. Congratulations Marc!

Monash University has once again been ranked by The Australian newspaper as the leading institute in Australia in the field of Discrete Mathematics, and David Wood is the leading researcher in the field of Discrete Mathematics.

The discrete mathematics research group will organise and host the 48th Australasian Combinatorics Conference (48ACC) at Monash on 7-11 December 2026. The website is now live:
https://48acc.github.io.

Prof Nick Wormald has been awarded the 2025 medal of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia.

This medal is awarded at most once every three years, and recognises lifetime achievements in research, student supervision, service and promotion of the discipline of combinatorics.

Melissa Lee is a star researcher. We knew that, but it was nice to have it recognised today with her winning an Early Career Researcher award from the Faculty of Science at Monash.