Discrete Mathematics

In today’s ARC grant announcements, Heiko Dietrich, David Wood and Mikhail Isaev each received Discovery Projects. Congratulations Heiko, David and Misha!

Tim Wilson and Kevin Hendrey submitted their PhD theses today, both supervised by David Wood. Congratulations Tim, Kevin and David! Tim’s thesis title is “Anagram-Free Graph Colouring and Colour Schemes”. Kevin’s thesis title is “Extremal Graph Theory for Minors, Improper Colourings and Gonality”.

Hearty congratulations to Daniel Horsley, who has just been promoted to level D (Associate Professor), effective from 1 Jan 2019.

Congratulations to Kai Siong Yow, who submitted his PhD thesis on 11th September. The title of the thesis is Tutte-Whitney polynomials for directed graphs and maps. Main supervisor was Graham Farr, associate supervisor was Kerri Morgan.

Great work by Darcy Best, whose PhD thesis “Transversal This, Transversal That” was officially ratified by the powers-that-be on June 20. So he is now a dinky-di doctor of philosophy. If you have any philosophical ailments, book an appointment. I’m sure his fees are reasonable.

Hearty congratulations to Darcy Best who submitted his PhD thesis today. His thesis is on transversals of Latin squares and related objects, (supervised by Ian Wanless)

Hearty congratulations to Daniel Horsley, who has been awarded the 2017 Hall medal by the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.

The Hall medal recognizes extensive quality research with substantial international impact by Fellows of the ICA in mid-career. Information about the ICA medals can be found at: http://luca-giuzzi.unibs.it/ICA/medals.php

Ian Wanless’ television career is burgeoning. Tonight he is in action on The Chase.

Monash PhD student Harald Bögeholz won the inaugural Anne Penfold Street Student Prize, for the best student talk at the conference 5ICC.

Harald’s presentation was entitled “Calculating Connected Components in Huge Graphs by Randomised Contraction”. Warm congratulations to Harald.

Monash hosted the 5th International Combinatorics Conference from 3-9 December 2017. It was attended by 163 mathematicians and students from Australia, Canada, China, Croatia, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Japan, Malta, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam (fully justifying the name of the conference!). There were 124 talks, 2 excursions, a public lecture and a memorable dinner.