Discrete Mathematics

Today, Robert Hickingbotham submitted his PhD thesis “Exploring Sparse and Hereditary Graph Classes via Products and Tree-Decompositions”, supervised by David Wood. Robert’s candidature has been incredibly successful, with 17 papers published or submitted. Congratulations to Robert and David!

Update (14th June 2024): Robert’s thesis is now accepted. Update (24th June): The degree is officially conferred. Congratulations, Dr Robert Hickingbotham! Robert will start a post-doc at ENS Lyon in August.

David Wood is currently recruiting a 2-year postdoctoral researcher in structural graph theory. The application deadline is 14th April 2024.

Group members will be invited speakers at various conferences in the 2024 European summer:

Daniel Horsley, Combinatorial Constructions Conference, Dubrovnik, Croatia, Apil 2024

Melissa Lee, Groups & Algebras in Bicocca for Young Algebraists, Milan-Bicocca, 17th-21st June 2024

David Wood, 9th European Congress of Mathematics, Sevilla, Spain, July 2024

Graham Farr, Dillon Mayhew and James Oxley have published an intriguing article Dominic Welsh: his work and influence on The Matroid Union.

Welcome to André Kündgen, who is visiting the group on sabbatical from California State University San Marcos.

We’re very excited to be advertising 5 permanent jobs at Monash. The positions can be in any area of mathematics, but discrete maths (including graph theory and combinatorics) is designated as a priority area. For the formal details see:

https://careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/job/660206/expressions-of-interest-multiple-positions-as-lecturer-senior-lecturer-associate-professor

Please spread the word and/or apply yourself. We can appoint young or established researchers, singles or couples. Monash discrete maths group is internationally important and Melbourne regularly features highly in lists of the world’s most liveable cities. So come and join us!

For any enquiries, email ian.wanless@monash.edu

Congratulations to Nina Kamčev for winning the inaugural CMSA Prize for her work completed at Monash University that led to the following papers:

N. Kamčev, A. Liebenau and N. Morrison, Towards a characterisation of Sidorenko systems, The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics.

N. Kamčev, A. Liebenau and N. Morrison, On uncommon systems of equations, Israel Journal of Mathematics.

The prize was announced today at the 45th ACC in Perth, where Nina gave an invited talk on her work.

This week, several group members are attending the MATRIX workshop Extremal Problems in Graphs, Designs, and Geometries organised by Daniel Horsley, Anita Liebenau (UNSW) and Tibor Szabo (Freie Universitat Berlin).

Visitors this week include Padraig Ó Catháin from Dublin City University and Tibor Szabó from Freie Universität Berlin.

This week Heiko, Santiago, Tomasz and Melissa are co-organisers of the 7th Australian Algebra Conference, held at Monash.