Discrete Mathematics

Monash hosted the 5th International Combinatorics Conference from 3-9 December 2017. It was attended by 163 mathematicians and students from Australia, Canada, China, Croatia, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Japan, Malta, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam (fully justifying the name of the conference!). There were 124 talks, 2 excursions, a public lecture and a memorable dinner.

Congratulations to Nick Wormald who will be an invited speaker in the Combinatorics section of the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians.

In today’s ARC grant announcements, Nick Wormald and Anita Liebenau received a Discovery Project. Congratulations Nick and Anita!

Today we celebrated the Bill Tutte Centenary Year with a half-day event consisting of the following short talks about his life, work, and influence on mathematics:

Graham Farr: Overview of Tutte’s life
Kerri Morgan: Squaring the square
Ron Steinfeld / Amin Sakzad: Tutte’s work at Bletchley Park in WW2
Kai Siong Yow: The dissection of equilateral triangles into equilateral triangles
Graham Farr: A ring in graph theory
Ranjie Mo: A contribution to the theory of chromatic polynomials
Jane Gao: When can vertices be all paired up?
Sanming Zhou (Melb): A family of cubical graphs
David Wood: How Tutte would draw a graph
Grant Cairns (La Trobe): The Hanani-Tutte Theorem
Norman Do: Tutte’s topological recursion
Daniel Mathews: The Tutte polynomial and knot theory
Andrew Elvey Price (Melb): Some counting problems on planar maps
Nick Wormald: My impressions of Tutte

William (Bill) Tutte (1917-2002) became a research mathematician while still an undergraduate at Cambridge in the late 1930s, broke the toughest Nazi codes while at Bletchley Park in WW2, and became one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. His work saved countless lives during the war and led the development of graph theory. His work was usually inspired by pure curiosity or recreational puzzles, but has been applied in domains as diverse as electrical circuits, statistical physics and information visualisation.

Nick Wormald is one of the 21 new fellows elected to the Australian Academy of Science. Congratulations Nick!

The citation: Nicholas Wormald is one of an elite group of mathematicians globally who combine the most advanced probability theory, combinatorics and theoretical computer science to produce deep insights into the nature of random and complex networks. He specialises in random graphs and probabilistic combinatorics, graph theory, enumeration, the analysis of graph algorithms, Steiner trees, the analysis of real-life networks, and other areas in combinatorics, as well as the optimisation of underground mine access networks. Wormald is responsible for an impressive number of major breakthroughs in these areas and many standard methods used today were his invention.

Group members are invited speakers at several British conferences this northern summer:

• Daniel Horsley at the 26th British Combinatorial Conference, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
• Graham Farr, Tutte Centenary Lecture at the 26th British Combinatorial Conference, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
• David Wood at the One-Day Meeting in Combinatorics, University of Oxford
• Daniel Horsley at Interactions with Combinatorics, University of Birmingham

Graham Farr has just had an article
Remembering Bill Tutte: another brilliant codebreaker from World War II
published in The Conversation, timed to coincide with the centenary of Tutte’s birth this Sunday 14th May.

Michael Brand’s novel Valkyries is published today.

“A masterfully crafted tapestry of ideas, plot and characters, interwoven into a daring, expansive and horizon-broadening read. Brand serves up a creation that links myth and science, the human and the universal. The reader is left feeling that the events he relates are simultaneously beyond all imagining and right around the corner. One of the most impressive and thought-provoking books I have ever read.”

— Idan Ben-Barak, author of “Small Wonders: How Microbes Rule our World”

Congratulations Rosie Hoyte on submitting her PhD Thesis entitled “Generalisations of the Doyen-Wilson Theorem”, supervised by Daniel Horsley. Great work!

Update 10 April 2017: Rosie’s thesis has officially been accepted. Congratulations Dr Rosie Hoyte! In September, Rosie will start a 2-year AARMS postdoctoral fellowship at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Darcy Best recently coached two Monash teams in the regional finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC).

One team, Monash Epsilon (Daniel Anderson, Xin Wei Chow, Peter Whalan) has advanced to the ICPC World Finals 2017 as one of the top 130 teams in the world! The ICPC World Finals is the most prestigious and largest programming competition worldwide.

The second Monash team, Monash Omicron (Michael Cui, Ryan Hechenberger, Shizhe Zhao), finished in 7th place, solving 4 problems, including solving one problem in only 5 minutes–the fastest time in the contest!