Discrete Mathematics

The Monash Discrete Mathematics Research Group is 10 years old today. Click here for the full history.

The School of Mathematical Sciences is hosting a Maths Graduate Open Day on Friday, 9 September, 2016. Potential postgraduate students from Australia and New Zealand will be invited to visit the School and meet with academics to discuss research topics, meet with current postgraduate students, spend some time on campus, and also enjoy an evening out in the city of Melbourne. Applications to participate close on Friday, 19 August 2016. Also see the `students’ page on the right.

Graham Farr has written an excellent piece in The Conversation: The Man Who Knew Infinity: inspiration, rigour and the art of mathematics.

On Friday the 6th May the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash hosted the Claude Shannon Centenary Celebration.

There were several short talks about Shannon’s life and work.

– Jamie Evans [Melbourne Uni] The life and times of Claude Elwood Shannon.
– Shampa Shahriyar [FIT, Monash] How Claude Shannon’s master thesis changed our world
– Jonathan Keith [Maths, Monash] Shannon’s PhD: An algebra for theoretical genetics
– Michael Brand [FIT, Monash] What is information?
– Amin Sakzad [FIT, Monash] Lossless data compression: a practical example
– Yi Hong [ECSE, Monash] Shannon’s noisy-channel coding theorem
– Kevin Leckey [Maths, Monash] The fundamental theorem for noisy channels: Shannon’s probabilistic proof
– Ron Steinfeld [FIT, Monash] Shannon and cryptography
– Graham Farr [FIT, Monash] Prediction and entropy of printed English
– David Dowe [FIT, Monash] Shannon’s influence on machine learning
– Alan Dorin [FIT, Monash] On automata and chess
– Graham Farr [FIT, Monash] Shannon’s switching game
– Rebecca Robinson [FIT, Monash] The Shannon capacity of a graph
– Michael Wybrow [FIT, Monash] Theseus the maze-solving mouse
– Burkard Polster [Maths, Monash] Juggling robots and theorems

Fantastic news in the latest round of ARC funding, with Michael Payne winning a DECRA Fellowship. The subject of the fellowship is geometric graph theory.

Congratulations to David Wood, who has been promoted to Professor! This puts him on level E, the highest in the Australian system, and is a significant honour.

Congratulations also to Heiko Dietrich, who has been promoted to Senior Lecturer (level C). Again this is a strong endorsement of his academic performance.

Congratulations to Nick Wormald and Jane Gao who have just been awarded a Discovery Grant by the Australian Research Council for them to study generation of random networks.

Sarada Herke, a postdoc in our group, recently gave a fascinating and inspiring talk at The Laborastory about Salman Khan, social entrepreneur in mathematics and science education. More recently, Ian Wanless spoke about Leonard Euler. And even more recently, Padraig Ó Catháin spoke about James Joseph Sylvester.

Jayama Mendis today (27/3/15) submitted her PhD thesis entitled “Autoparatopisms of Latin Squares”. The thesis was supervised by Ian Wanless, with Daniel Horsley as the associate supervisor.

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