Discrete Mathematics

Today, in a significant honour, Robert Hickingbotham was awarded the CMSA Anne Penfold Street Student Prize. The prize was awarded to the best student talk at the 44th Australasian Combinatorics Conference. His talk was entitled “Product structure of graph classes with bounded treewidth” and arose out of work performed at a recent MATRIX workshop on Structural Graph Theory. It was judged on criteria including motivation, methods, organisation, substance, originality and rapport to be the best talk in a strong field.

Congratulations Robert on a great effort!

This week several group members are attending the MATRIX-IBS workshop Structural Graph Theory Downunder II in Creswick, just out of Melbourne. It is wonderful to be doing mathematics face-to-face again.

This week group members are organising and attending the MATRIX workshop Structural Graph Theory Downunder at Creswick, 100km west of Melbourne.

Participants:
Maria Chudnovsky (Princeton Uni), Zdeněk Dvořák (Charles Uni, Prague), Gwenaël Joret (Uni Libre de Bruxelles), Kevin Hendrey (IBS, Korea), Tony Huynh (Monash Uni), Nina Kamcev (Monash Uni), Ringi Kim (KAIST, Korea), Tereza Klimošová (Charles Uni, Prague), Anita Liebenau (UNSW Sydney), Chun-Hung Liu (Texas A&M), Natasha Morrison (Uni Cambridge), Marcin Pilipczuk (Uni Warsaw), Bruce Reed (McGill Uni), Alex Scott (Uni Oxford), Paul Seymour (Princeton Uni), Maya Stein (Uni de Chile), Jane Tan (Uni Oxford), David Wood (Monash Uni), Liana Yepremyan (Uni Oxford), Yelena Yuditsky (Ben-Gurion Uni), Xuding Zhu (Zhejiang Normal Uni)

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.

Today we celebrated the Bill Tutte Centenary Year with a half-day event consisting of the following short talks about his life, work, and influence on mathematics:

Graham Farr: Overview of Tutte’s life
Kerri Morgan: Squaring the square
Ron Steinfeld / Amin Sakzad: Tutte’s work at Bletchley Park in WW2
Kai Siong Yow: The dissection of equilateral triangles into equilateral triangles
Graham Farr: A ring in graph theory
Ranjie Mo: A contribution to the theory of chromatic polynomials
Jane Gao: When can vertices be all paired up?
Sanming Zhou (Melb): A family of cubical graphs
David Wood: How Tutte would draw a graph
Grant Cairns (La Trobe): The Hanani-Tutte Theorem
Norman Do: Tutte’s topological recursion
Daniel Mathews: The Tutte polynomial and knot theory
Andrew Elvey Price (Melb): Some counting problems on planar maps
Nick Wormald: My impressions of Tutte

William (Bill) Tutte (1917-2002) became a research mathematician while still an undergraduate at Cambridge in the late 1930s, broke the toughest Nazi codes while at Bletchley Park in WW2, and became one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. His work saved countless lives during the war and led the development of graph theory. His work was usually inspired by pure curiosity or recreational puzzles, but has been applied in domains as diverse as electrical circuits, statistical physics and information visualisation.

Group members are invited speakers at several British conferences this northern summer:

• Daniel Horsley at the 26th British Combinatorial Conference, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
• Graham Farr, Tutte Centenary Lecture at the 26th British Combinatorial Conference, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
• David Wood at the One-Day Meeting in Combinatorics, University of Oxford
• Daniel Horsley at Interactions with Combinatorics, University of Birmingham

The discrete maths group hosted the workshop “Probabilistic and Extremal Combinatorics Downunder” last week (13-17 June). The workshop was a great success, with 64 participants including 32 from overseas and with 8 Australian universities represented. A highlight of the workshop were talks by 20 invited speakers, and the contributed talks were also of a very high standard. In the feedback we received, several people simply said it was the best conference they had ever attended!

Ron Steinfeld and colleagues won the best paper prize at ASIACRYPT 2015. The paper is “Improved security proofs in lattice-based cryptography: using the Rényi divergence rather than the statistical distance” by Shi Bai, Adeline Langlois, Tancrède Lepoint, Damien Stehlé, and Ron Steinfeld. The prize included a T-shirt with part of the prize-winning paper printed on it!

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.