Discrete Mathematics

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!

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

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.