Discrete Mathematics

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!

We don’t always keep this page up to date with visitors and this might explain why: We’re having a happy deluge of them!!
In a period of a little more than a month we’re hosting:

Jason Gao (Carleton University)
Krzysztof Choromanski (Google research)
Nick Cavenagh (University of Waikato)
Marston Conder (University of Auckland)
Gautam Appa (London School of Economics)
Reshma Ramadurai (University of Waikato)
Saad El-Zanati (Illinois State University)
Penny Haxell (University of Waterloo)

It’s great to have so many talented people visiting to talk maths — it makes for a very vibrant atmosphere of ideas.

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.

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,