Discrete Mathematics

Ian Wanless gave a most entertaining talk at The Laborastory today, as part of their annual villains edition.

Michael Brand has just had an article, “Can Facebook influence an election result?“, published in The Conversation. It has attracted a lot of interest, including an ABC TV interview, three radio interviews, and a quotation in the Washington Post.

Big congratulations to Daniel Horsley, who has just been awarded the Kirkman medal by the Institute for Combinatorics and its Applications. The medal is a worldwide recognition for outstanding discoveries by an early career researcher in combinatorics.

Congratulations to Darcy Best who won the Faculty of Science 3 Minute Thesis Competition as well as winning the people’s vote. Darcy will now represent the Faculty at the Monash-wide competition.

The Monash Discrete Mathematics Research Group is 10 years old today. Click here for the full history.

The School of Mathematical Sciences is hosting a Maths Graduate Open Day on Friday, 9 September, 2016. Potential postgraduate students from Australia and New Zealand will be invited to visit the School and meet with academics to discuss research topics, meet with current postgraduate students, spend some time on campus, and also enjoy an evening out in the city of Melbourne. Applications to participate close on Friday, 19 August 2016. Also see the `students’ page on the right.

The discrete maths group hosted the workshop “Probabilistic and Extremal Combinatorics Downunder” last week (13-17 June). The workshop was a great success, with 64 participants including 32 from overseas and with 8 Australian universities represented. A highlight of the workshop were talks by 20 invited speakers, and the contributed talks were also of a very high standard. In the feedback we received, several people simply said it was the best conference they had ever attended!

Graham Farr has written an excellent piece in The Conversation: The Man Who Knew Infinity: inspiration, rigour and the art of mathematics.

On Friday the 6th May the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash hosted the Claude Shannon Centenary Celebration.

There were several short talks about Shannon’s life and work.

– Jamie Evans [Melbourne Uni] The life and times of Claude Elwood Shannon.
– Shampa Shahriyar [FIT, Monash] How Claude Shannon’s master thesis changed our world
– Jonathan Keith [Maths, Monash] Shannon’s PhD: An algebra for theoretical genetics
– Michael Brand [FIT, Monash] What is information?
– Amin Sakzad [FIT, Monash] Lossless data compression: a practical example
– Yi Hong [ECSE, Monash] Shannon’s noisy-channel coding theorem
– Kevin Leckey [Maths, Monash] The fundamental theorem for noisy channels: Shannon’s probabilistic proof
– Ron Steinfeld [FIT, Monash] Shannon and cryptography
– Graham Farr [FIT, Monash] Prediction and entropy of printed English
– David Dowe [FIT, Monash] Shannon’s influence on machine learning
– Alan Dorin [FIT, Monash] On automata and chess
– Graham Farr [FIT, Monash] Shannon’s switching game
– Rebecca Robinson [FIT, Monash] The Shannon capacity of a graph
– Michael Wybrow [FIT, Monash] Theseus the maze-solving mouse
– Burkard Polster [Maths, Monash] Juggling robots and theorems

Ron Steinfeld and colleagues won the best paper prize at ASIACRYPT 2015. The paper is “Improved security proofs in lattice-based cryptography: using the Rényi divergence rather than the statistical distance” by Shi Bai, Adeline Langlois, Tancrède Lepoint, Damien Stehlé, and Ron Steinfeld. The prize included a T-shirt with part of the prize-winning paper printed on it!