Discrete Mathematics

Michael Payne recently graduated with his PhD degree from Melbourne University. His thesis, supervised by David Wood, is titled Combinatorial geometry of point sets with collinearities. Michael’s undergraduate degree was at Monash, where his honours thesis was supervised by Ian Wanless. Michael is currently completing a post-doc at Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Congratulations to PhD student Darcy Best on winning the CMSA Prize for the best student talk at the recent 38th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing (ACCMCC) at Victoria University in Wellington NZ.  Darcy’s talk was titled `Transversals in Latin Squares’.  Main Supervisor is Ian Wanless and Associate Supervisor is Daniel Horsley.  You can see a list of all past CMSA Prize winners, along with information on the prize and its criteria, at
http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/CMSA/studentprize.htm

Daniel Horsley will be talking about Georg Cantor at the Laborastory at the Spotted Mallard on November 19. Listen to Daniel’s wonderful talk here,

Congratulations to Daniel Horsley and Ian Wanless for receiving an ARC Discovery Project with Darryn Bryant.

Congratulations to Daniel Harvey on the occasion of his PhD graduation (from Melbourne University). Daniel is now a post-doc in the discrete mathematics group.

The School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash is hosting the 32nd Annual Victorian Algebra Conference (VAC32) from Thursday October 2 – Friday October 3. Registration is free.

Congratulations to PhD student Darcy Best who, along with Aamir Cheema of FIT, has organised and trained student teams for this year’s ACM Inter-Collegiate Programming Competition, resulting in one Monash team winning second place (and best from Victoria), out of 30 from Vic, SA, WA & Tas, in the first round, meaning that they go on to a South Pacific regional competition in Sydney later this month.

Many group members recently visited South Korea as part of the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians, including Graham Farr who took part in a Baduk (Go) event comprising a number of simultaneous games, in which five Baduk professionals each played 5-6 other players. Four of the professionals were top level (9 dan) and some have been regarded as the top players in the world.

Congratulations to Daniel Harvey and Michael Payne, who recently completed their PhD degrees at Melbourne University, supervised by David Wood.

Daniel Harvey “On treewidth and graph minors”
Michael Payne “Combinatorial geometry of point sets with collinearities”

Both Daniel and Michael have strong connections to Monash: Daniel is currently a research fellow, and Michael did his undergraduate degree here.

Finally, congratulations to Graham Farr, who is now an academic grandfather.

In the Clayton School of IT Trivia Night last Friday, the team of the Discrete Mathematics research group, “The Chi Squares”, took out first place!