Discrete Mathematics

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

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 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.

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!

PhD Student Darcy Best recently returned to Canada for his graduation from University of Lethbridge. He won the Governor General of Canada’s Gold Medal for top graduate across the whole university in the academic year 2013/14. Pretty impressive!