Discrete Mathematics

In the 2023 Research Awards of The Australian newspaper, Monash University is the “lead institution” in discrete mathematics, and David Wood is the “field leader” in both discrete mathematics and pure & applied mathematics.

Adam Gowty submitted today his PhD thesis “Problems related to Sperner set systems”, supervised by Daniel Horsley and Ian Wanless.

Update 9 Dec 2022: Adam’s thesis is now accepted. Congratulations Dr Gowty!

Graham Farr and Rebecca Robinson have received the Faculty of IT Dean’s Award for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Education. This was for creating an equitable, engaging and supportive learning environment for their students in FIT2014 Theory of Computation by developing and implementing innovations including: post-lecture interviews with key figures in the field during the COVID-19 lockdowns to better engage with students, with many interview subjects being women; embedding notes on the history of computer science throughout the unit, highlight key figures from underrepresented groups who were instrumental to the development of the field; a mentoring program for new tutors to help them build confidence, with Rebecca herself mentoring women tutors.

Dr Harald Bögeholz’s PhD was conferred on 8th June and he graduated today! His thesis is titled A Relational Model for Parallel Computation. Harald is the first PhD graduate of his Main Supervisor, Michael Brand. Associate Supervisor is Graham Farr.

Nina Kamčev, Anita Liebenau, Nick Wormald. Asymptotic enumeration of hypergraphs by degree sequence. Adv. Comb. 2022.

Graham Farr. The history of Tutte–Whitney polynomials. In: Handbook of the Tutte Polynomial and Related Topics, Chapman and Hall, 2022.

Ian M. Wanless, David R. Wood. A general framework for hypergraph coloring. SIAM J. Discrete Math. 2022.

Alexander Cant, Heiko Dietrich, Bettina Eick, Tobias Moede. Galois trees in the graph of p-groups of maximal class. J. Algebra 2022.

Tao Feng, Daniel Horsley, Xiaomiao Wang. Novák’s conjecture on cyclic Steiner triple systems and its generalization. J. Combin. Theory Ser. A, 2021.

Norman Do, Danilo Lewański. On the Goulden-Jackson-Vakil conjecture for double Hurwitz numbers. Adv. Math. 2022.

Kevin Hendrey. Sergey Norin, David R. Wood. Extremal functions for sparse minors. Adv. Comb. 2022.

Chun-Hung Liu, David R. Wood. Clustered variants of Hajós’ conjecture. J. Combin. Theory Ser. B, 2022.

Mikhail Isaev, Angus Southwell, Maksim Zhukovskii. Distribution of tree parameters by martingale approach. Combin. Probab. Comput. 2022.

We are currently advertising for a post-doctoral research fellow with experience in at least one of extremal graph theory, combinatorial design theory, or finite geometry. Enquires to Daniel Horsley.

The Monash discrete maths seminar is happening again after a long pandemic-induced pause. The group calendar is the best way to stay informed.

Congratulations to Angus Southwell for submitting his PhD thesis
Properties of induced subgraphs of random graphs with given degree sequences supervised by Nick Wormald, Jane Gao, and Misha Isaev.

Update Nov 2022: Angus’s PhD has now been conferred. Congratulations Dr Southwell!

Congratulations to Ajani de Vas Gunasekara for submitting her PhD thesis “Completion and Embedding Problems for Combinatorial Designs” supervised by Daniel Horsley.

Update (22 August): Ajani’s PhD has now been accepted. The final version is available here.

This week the group is hosting the following international visitors:

Rutger Campbell, Pascal Gollin, Kevin Hendrey (Institute for Basic Science, Korea)

Jane Tan, Youri Tamitegama, Freddie Illingworth (University of Oxford, UK)

They will work with Monash staff and students, Marc Distel, Robert Hickingbotham, Tony Huynh and David Wood.

Update (6th June 2022): The week was very productive, leading to the paper “Product structure of graph classes with bounded treewidth“.