Discrete Mathematics

Congratulations to Daniel Harvey on the occasion of his PhD graduation (from Melbourne University). Daniel is now a post-doc in the discrete mathematics group.

The School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash is hosting the 32nd Annual Victorian Algebra Conference (VAC32) from Thursday October 2 – Friday October 3. Registration is free.

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.

Congratulations to Daniel Harvey and Michael Payne, who recently completed their PhD degrees at Melbourne University, supervised by David Wood.

Daniel Harvey “On treewidth and graph minors”
Michael Payne “Combinatorial geometry of point sets with collinearities”

Both Daniel and Michael have strong connections to Monash: Daniel is currently a research fellow, and Michael did his undergraduate degree here.

Finally, congratulations to Graham Farr, who is now an academic grandfather.

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!

Congratulations to Michael Brand, who has won the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal for the best PhD thesis completed in the Faculty of I.T. at Monash University in 2013. One such medal is awarded in each Faculty, each year, at Monash. He also won the 2013 Faculty of I.T. Doctoral Medal which has criteria for other contributions as well as thesis excellence. The thesis is titled “Computing with Arbitrary and Random Numbers“. Michael’s main supervisor was Graham Farr, and associate supervisor was Ian Wanless. Michael will graduate in May 2014.

Nick Wormald‘s research is featured in in the latest issue of Monash Magazine. The article explains well the nature of some of Nick’s work, and of graph theory and pure mathematics generally, to non-technical readers.

Heiko Dietrich is co-organising a session on “Software, algorithms, and applications of computational group theory” at The 4th International Congress on Mathematical Software (ICMS 2014), which is a satellite conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2014).