Discrete Mathematics

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).

Congratulations to David Fear, who submitted his MSc thesis entitled “Diagonally Cyclic Equitable Rectangles and Cyclotomic Orthomorphisms” on 31 Jan 2014. David’s primary supervisor was Ian Wanless, associate supervisor was Daniel Horsley, and external supervisor was Tony Evans (Wright State University, USA).

Congratulations to Ian Wanless for his promotion to Professor. Richly deserved!

Congratulations to Marsha Minchenko on the submission of her PhD thesis entitled “Counting Subgraphs of Regular Graphs using Spectral Moments”. And congratulations to supervisor Ian Wanless too.

Update (8 May 2014): Marsha has been awarded the PhD degree.

Today, Simon Angus from the Monash Department of Economics spoke on the topic of graphs in economics. Here is an expanded version of his slides.

This week most of the group members are attending 37ACCMCC at The University of Western Australia. Nick Wormald and Graham Farr will be giving plenary lectures.