Discrete Mathematics

This week we are hosting Marcin Briański, who is a visiting PhD student from Jagiellonian University in Poland.

Following last week’s MATRIX-IBS Workshop Structural Graph Theory Downunder III, this week we are hosting several visitors: Kevin Hendrey, Rutger Campbell, Pascal Gollin, Sebastian Wiederrecht (all from IBS Korea), James Davies (from Cambridge), and Liana Yepremyan and Bryce Frederickson (both from Emory).

Well it wasn’t quite an Oscar, but Nick Wormald has won an award surely worthy of the red carpet.

It is the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal, awarded by the Australian Academy of Science in recognition for his outstanding achievements in mathematical research. The citation recognised that Nick is a world leader in his field: he has made major contributions in the areas of random graphs and processes, enumeration of graphs and maps, structural graph theory, theoretical computer science, and network optimisation. See

https://www.science.org.au/supporting-science/awards-and-opportunities/thomas-ranken-lyle-medal

Welcome to Dr Melissa Lee who has joined the School of Mathematics as Lecturer and DECRA Fellow. Melissa’s research interests include finite group theory, representation theory of almost simple groups, finite geometry and combinatorics.

Today, in a significant honour, Robert Hickingbotham was awarded the CMSA Anne Penfold Street Student Prize. The prize was awarded to the best student talk at the 44th Australasian Combinatorics Conference. His talk was entitled “Product structure of graph classes with bounded treewidth” and arose out of work performed at a recent MATRIX workshop on Structural Graph Theory. It was judged on criteria including motivation, methods, organisation, substance, originality and rapport to be the best talk in a strong field.

Congratulations Robert on a great effort!

Today, Ian Wanless was awarded the CMSA Medal of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia. The CMSA Medal is an award for long and meritorious service to combinatorics. It is established to pay tribute to those members of the CMSA who, over a long period, have taken a significant leadership role in the CMSA and who have made valuable contributions to combinatorics. Ian has served the CMSA as President (twice) and Council Member.

The group is hosting several international visitors this week.
Gwenaël Joret‬ (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Nick Cavenagh (University of Waikato)
Piotr Micek (Jagiellonian University)
Pat Morin (Carleton University)

The group is currently hosting two Gordon Preston Fellows, Vida Dujmovic and Bruce Reed.

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!