Discrete Mathematics

Well it wasn’t quite an Oscar, but Nick Wormald has won an award surely worthy of the red carpet.

It is the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal, awarded by the Australian Academy of Science in recognition for his outstanding achievements in mathematical research. The citation recognised that Nick is a world leader in his field: he has made major contributions in the areas of random graphs and processes, enumeration of graphs and maps, structural graph theory, theoretical computer science, and network optimisation. See

https://www.science.org.au/supporting-science/awards-and-opportunities/thomas-ranken-lyle-medal

Welcome to Dr Melissa Lee who has joined the School of Mathematics as Lecturer and DECRA Fellow. Melissa’s research interests include finite group theory, representation theory of almost simple groups, finite geometry and combinatorics.

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!

Today, Ian Wanless was awarded the CMSA Medal of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia. The CMSA Medal is an award for long and meritorious service to combinatorics. It is established to pay tribute to those members of the CMSA who, over a long period, have taken a significant leadership role in the CMSA and who have made valuable contributions to combinatorics.

In the 2023 Research Awards of The Australian newspaper, Monash University is the “lead institution” in discrete mathematics, and David Wood is the “field leader” in both discrete mathematics and pure & applied mathematics.

Congratulations to group members Daniel Horsley, Nick Wormald and Ron Steinfeld for receiving ARC Discovery Projects.

Congratulations to honours student Jack Allsop (supervised by Ian Wanless) who just shared the Anne Penfold Street prize for best student talk at the 43rd Australasian Combinatorics Conference. His talk was entitled “Row-Hamiltonian Latin Squares”. Jack is the 4th group member to win this prize: https://combinatorics-australasia.org/students.html

Monash University is recognised as a “global leader” in discrete mathematics in the latest research report of The Australian newspaper. Only 20 research groups in Australia (across all disciplines) were given this status.

Nick Wormald was named the top researcher in Australia in theoretical computer science, and David Wood was named the top researcher in Australia in both discrete mathematics and pure & applied mathematics.

The Combinatorics and Graph Theory special session of yesterday and today’s AustMS meeting featured the following talks by group members:

• Ajani De Vas Gunasekara. An Evans-style result for block designs
• David Wood. Stack-number is not bounded by queue-number
• Daniel Horsley. Fraisse limits of Steiner triple systems

And the Algebra special session featured the following talks by group members:

• Heiko Dietrich. Some comments on group isomorphism
• Xueyu Pan. Groups of small order type
• Subhrajyoti Saha. Orbit Isomorphic Skeleton Groups

Congratulations to James Saunderson for receiving an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award for a project “Realising the potential of hyperbolic programming”.