CMSA E-Newsletter 49

=Introduction=

Thanks to all CMSA members who have sent information for this newsletter, CMSA E-Newsletter 49, issued July 2017. Please send news as soon as you have anything of possible interest to CMSA members and the Combinatorial Community, even if no newsletter is imminent! Please email the Newsletter Editor (Kevin McAvaney): kevin.mcavaney at ozemail.com.au

CLOSING DATE for Issue 50: 30 Setember 2017. (Please email items to the newsletter editor ONLY in plain text.)

Old newsletters can be found here.

=Aims of the newsletter=
 * To promote combinatorics within Australasia.


 * To provide a forum for sharing combinatorial and related information.

=Workshop and conference announcements=
 * To keep CMSA members informed and in touch with combinatorial and related matters.

5ICC December 2017
The 5th International Combinatorics Conference (5ICC) will be held at Monash University in Melbourne from Monday 4 to Friday 9 December 2017. The ICC is held approximately every 10 years, and incorporates the annual meeting of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia

Provisional list of invited speakers


 * Bill Chen, Nankai University
 * Maria Chudnovsky, Princeton University
 * Charlie Colbourn, Arizona State University
 * Marston Conder, University of Auckland
 * David Eppstein, University of California, Irvine
 * Joanna Fawcett, Cambridge University
 * Jacob Fox, Stanford University
 * Daniela Kühn, Birmingham University
 * Barbara Maenhaut, University of Queensland
 * Brendan McKay, Australian National University
 * Alexander Scott, Oxford University
 * Paul Seymour, Princeton University
 * Balázs Szegedy, Rényi Institute
 * Le Anh Vinh, Vietnam National University

More Information

Conference website: http://monash.edu/5icc/ Contact: 5icc at monash.edu. Telephone: +61 3 99054442

IWOCA July 2017
The 28th International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms (IWOCA 2017) will be held from Monday 17 to Friday 21 July 2017in Newcastle, Australia. It is dedicated to the memory of Professor Mirka Miller. who died in January 2016. Mirka was one of the founders and continuing supporters of this series of workshops, formerly known as A(ustralasian)WOCA.

Invited speakers include


 * Martin Baca (Technical University, Kosice)
 * Camino Balbuena (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)
 * Diane Donovan (University of Queensland)
 * Henning Fernau (University of Trier)
 * Costas Iliopoulos (King’s College London) with Mai Alzamel
 * Jennifer Seberry (University of Wollongong)

Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:


 * Algorithms and Data Structures
 * Complexity Theory
 * Graph Theory & Combinatorics
 * Combinatorial Optimization
 * Cryptography & Information Security
 * Algorithms on Strings & Graphs
 * Graph Drawing & Labelling
 * Computational Algebra & Geometry
 * Computational Biology
 * Probabilistic & Randomised Algorithms
 * Algorithms for Big Data Analytics
 * New Paradigms of Computation

More Information

Conference website: https://carma.newcastle.edu.au/meetings/iwoca/index.html Contact: co-chairs Ljiljana Brankovic and Joe Ryan

61st Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society December 2017
The 6ist Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society will be held at Macquarie University, Sydney, from Tuesday 12 to Friday 15 December 2017

Invited speakers include Catherine Greenhill (UNSW): Graph theory, random algorithms

More Information

Conference website: http://www.austms.org.au/tiki-calendar.php?calitemId=727 Contact: co-directors Paul Smith and Xuan Duong

WIMSIG Conference 2017: Celebration of Women in Australian Mathematical Sciences
The Women in Mathematics Special Interest Group Conference 2017 will be held at the University of South Australia, City West Campus, Adelaide from Sunday 24 to Tuesday 26 September 2017. This is Australia's first research conference showcasing the research of women in the mathematical sciences. The conference welcomes people of any gender. All the research talks will be given by women. "Mathematical sciences" will be broadly interpreted to include pure mathematics, applied mathematics, mathematical statistics, applied statistics, biostatistics, bioinformatics, mathematical biology, mathematical physics, mathematics in industry, etc.

Some special sessions are planned which may be of particular interest to CMSA members, including


 * Algebra, Discrete Mathematics and Number Theory
 * Cryptography, Coding and Compression
 * Industrial Mathematics

Confirmed plenary speakers:


 * Professor Kerrie Mengersen (QUT)
 * Dr Christine O’Keefe (CSIRO)
 * Professor Malabika Pramanik (University of British Columbia, Canada)
 * Professor Ami Radunskaya (Pomona College, USA, and President of the US Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM)).

More Information

Conference website: http://www.austms.org.au/WIMSIG-conference-2017 Contact: Catherine Greenhill (c.greenhill at unsw.edu.au)

Buildings and Symmetry Workshop September 2017
The workshop “Buildings and Symmetry” will be held at the University of Western Australia from Monday 25 to Friday 29 September 2017. There will be an emphasis on the symmetries/group theory/Lie theory aspects of built structures. More Information

Website: https://buildingsandsymmetry.wordpress.com/ Contact: Alice Devillers (alice.devillers at uwa.edu.au)

More combinatorics conferences
Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC2017), London, UK, 9-14 July 2017 https://sites.google.com/site/fpsac2017/

Tutte Centenary Conference, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK, 10–12 July 2017 https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/events/tutte100/

The 5th Workshop on Real and Complex Hadamard Matrices and Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 10-14 July 2017 http://www.renyi.hu/conferences/hadamard2017/

The 23rd Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON'17) will be held in Hong Kong, China, 3–5 August 2017 http://cocoon2017.comp.polyu.edu.hk/

European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications (Eurocomb 2017), Vienna, Austria, 28 August – 1 September 2017 http://www.dmg.tuwien.ac.at/eurocomb2017/

The 15th Workshop on Approximation and Online Algorithms (WAOA 2017) Vienna, Austria, 7–8 September 2017 https://algo2017.ac.tuwien.ac.at/waoa/

5th Irrsee Conference on Finite Geometries, Irrsee, Germany, 10–16 September 2017 http://cage.ugent.be/~ml/irsee5/irsee5.html

5th Gdansk Workshop on Graph Theory, Sopot, Poland, 13–15 September 2017 https://sites.google.com/site/gwgt2017/invited-speakers

Extremal Combinatorics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, 18–22 September 2017 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/maths/research/events/2017-18/nonsymposium/ec

=Recent news=

PhD scholarships
UNSW has an opening for up to two UNSW Scientia PhD scholarships within the project Algorithms for Scheduling and Cooperation in Distributed Energy Markets. The project is to design and implement modern algorithms (parameterized algorithms and approximation algorithms) for problems around clean energy technology adoption. The UNSW Scientia PhD scholarships are very generous scholarships covering the tuition fees, a stipend of AUD 40,000 per year, and a research support package of AUD 10,000 per year. Supervisory team: Serge Gaspers, Iain Macgill, and Aleksandar Ignjatovic. Apply by 14 July 2017. More details: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~sergeg/index.html#ScientiaPhD

New PhDs
Wei-Juan Zhang completed a PhD in February 2017 at the University of Auckland, on "Constructions for chiral polytopes", under the supervision of Marston Conder and Dimitri Leemans, and won a "Dean's List" distinction. Wei-Juan has now accepted a long-term position at Sun Yat-sen University in China.

Jeremie Moerenhout completed a PhD in April 2017 at the University of Auckland, on "Chiral polytopes arising from almost-simple groups with socle PSL(2,q)", under the supervision of Dimitri Leemans and Marston Conder. Jeremie now has a temporary position at the Free University of Brussels.

Rosalind Hoyte has completed her PhD at Monash University, supervised by Daniel Horsley. The title of her thesis is Generalisations of the Doyen-Wilson Theorem, and it may be found at https://figshare.com/articles/Generalisations_of_the_Doyen-Wilson_Theorem/4796587

Dr Zongzheng (Eric) Zhou completed his PhD at Monash University, supervised by Tim Garoni (main) and Greg Markowsky and Daniel Tokarev (associate). Thesis title is Phase Transitions of Some Discrete Models in Statistical Mechanics, and it may be found at https://figshare.com/articles/Phase_transitions_of_some_discrete_models_in_statistical_mechanics/4719778

UNSW News
Thomas Britz is presently on sabbatical, visiting research groups led by Graham Farr (Monash University), Henrik Kragh Sørensen (The University of Copenhagen), and Camilla Hollanti (Aalto University).

Monash News
Prof Nick Wormald is one of the 21 new fellows elected to the Australian Academy of Science. Congratulations Nick! Citation as follows. 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. https://www.science.org.au/news-and-events/news-and-media-releases/21-australias-best-scientists-join-academy

Michael Brand's mathematical puzzles website "Using your Head is Permitted" marked its tenth anniversary in March 2017. http://www.brand.site.co.il/riddles/usingyourhead.html

Graham Farr had an article about W. T. (Bill) Tutte published in The Conversation on Friday 12 May, anticipating the centenary of his birth two days later, on Sunday 14 May. https://theconversation.com/remembering-bill-tutte-another-brilliant-codebreaker-from-world-war-ii-77556

Prof. Keisuke Shiromoto, of the Dept of Mathematics & Engineering, Kumamoto University, Japan, is visiting Graham Farr from 1 September 2017 to 31 March 2018. His combinatorial interests include coding theory and matroids.

=The Australasian Journal of Combinatorics= The website for the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics is http://ajc.maths.uq.edu.au/.

The Journal is now online only, free for readers and authors (so it is a 'diamond open access' journal). There are three volumes per year, with each volume closing in February, June and October, matching the time of publication of the old paper volumes. Volumes are currently being uploaded in three batches. Part 3 of Volume 68 (2017) was recently uploaded; part 1 of Volume 69 will be uploaded in early August.

Visit http://ajc.maths.uq.edu.au/ and sign up to subscribe to email notices whenever new papers are published. The contents of all volumes, 1 to 68, are listed at the above web page.

Submissions to the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics may be sent to ajc@maths.uq.edu.au. Only pdf files are required at submission stage. There will be a special issue in honour of Anne Penfold Street appearing in 2018. Submissions for this special issue should be received before the end of August; please contact the journal at ajc@maths.uq.edu.au regarding any extension to this.

The Journal is now indexed by Scopus from Volume 13 (1996) onwards, and by Thomson Reuters "Emerging Sources Citation Index" from 2015 on.

ISSN: 2202-3518 (online only, after 2013); 1034-4942 (paper, before 2014).

=Editor= Kevin McAvaney, Australia. Email: kevin.mcavaney at ozemail.com.au