CMSA E-Newsletter 8

COMBINATORIAL MATHEMATICS SOCIETY OF AUSTRALASIA (INC)

CMSA E-Newsletter Number 8 (February 2002)

INTRODUCTION:

Many thanks to the members who have sent information for this newsletter.

CLOSING DATE for Issue 9: 31 May 2002. Email ejb@maths.uq.edu.au with all your news and information; anything at all of interest to CMSA Members is most welcome.

CMSA WEB PAGE: http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~db/CMSA/cmsa.html Note this location!

NEWSLETTER WEB VERSIONS: (complete list) http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~ejb/cmsa-newsletters.html

CMSA CONFERENCE HISTORY PAGE (all past conferences organised under the CMSA; thanks to Kevin McAvaney for starting this page) http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/cdmc/history.html

A useful combinatorial site is the British Combinatorial Committee's web page: http://www.maths.qmw.ac.uk/~pjc/bcc/bcc.html (Conference listings in combinatorics are also available from that page.)

CONTENTS:

   * AIMS of the newsletter
   * FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS

• ICAA 2002 International Conference on Algebra and its Applications, Bangkok, 18-20 MARCH 2002.
• ACISP'02 7th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy 3-5 JULY 2002.
• AWOCA 2002 Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms 6-10 JULY 2002.
• 27ACCMCC University of Newcastle, 9-13 DEC 2002.
• Graph Theory of Brian Alspach Simon Fraser University 25-29 MAY 2003.

   * RECENT NEWS OF CMSA MEMBERS and others

• Ron Mullin Award from Rostock University (Oct 2001)
• Nick Hamilton and Matt Brown returning to Australia wanting employment please!
• Cheryl Praeger news from the University of Western Australia
• David Glynn has left the University of Canterbury, NZ wanting employment please!
• Kevin McAvaney with news from Oman
• Andrew Blinco with news of his six months overseas
• Abdollah Khodkar with news of his six months overseas
• Peter Adams with his news from Queensland
• Brenton Gray has returned to Queensland
• Jim MacDougall with news from the University of Newcastle
• Mirka Miller with more news from the University of Newcastle

   * EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES
   * AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS

AIMS of the newsletter:

   * to promote combinatorics within Australasia
   * to provide a forum for sharing combinatorial and related information
   * to keep CMSA Members informed and in touch with combinatorial and related matters

FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS: ICAA 2002 An International Conference on Algebra and its Applications will be held at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand from 18-20 MARCH 2002.

The conference will consist of plenary lectures by world renowned mathematicians and parallel sessions of contributing papers. The following is the list of invited speakers:

   * K. DENNECKE (University of Postdam, Germany)
     News on the Lattice of Varieties of Semirings
   * J.M. HOWIE (University of St. Andrews, U.K.)
     Semigroups, Past, Present and Future
   * M. ITO (Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan)
     Languages and Automata
   * Y. KEMPRASIT (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand)
     Quasi-ideals and Bi-ideals in Semigroups and Rings
   * C.E. PRAEGER (University of Western Australia, Australia)
     Finite Arc-Transitive Graphs and Their Automorphism Groups
   * A.H. RHEMTULLA (University of Alberta, Canada)
     Orderable Groups - Recent Results and Open Problems
   * V. SANH (Khon Kaen University, Thailand)
     On Generalizations of Injectivity and Their Applications in Characterizing Some Class of Rings
   * K.P. SHUM (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
     Abundant Semigroups and Their Generalizations
   * F. WINKLER (University of Linz, Austria)
     Advances in Algebraic Geometric Computation
   * Y. XU (Fudan University, Shanghai, P.R. China)
     New Direct Product Rings and Infinite Matrix Rings 

IMPORTANT DATES have now passed: 1.  : October 31, 2001: Deadline for abstract submission. 2.  : November 30, 2001: Notification of abstract acceptance. 3.  : January 15, 2002: Deadline for full paper submission.

See http://www.math.sc.chula.ac.th/icaa2002

ACISP'02

The 7th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ACISP'02) will be held in Melbourne from July 3 to 5 at Rydges Riverwalk Hotel. In conjunction with the conference, there is an afternoon workshop on computer forensics on July 2 at Deakin's Toorak campus. Details can be found on http://www.cm.deakin.edu.au/ACISP'02. In particular, the submission deadline for ACISP papers, which will be published by Springer, is February 18, 2002.

Lynn Batten, Deakin University

AWOCA 2002 The Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms will be hosted by the University of Queensland, with the venue being Kingfisher Bay Resort, Fraser Island, Queensland, from 7-10 JULY 2002.

Confirmed invited speakers at the moment are

   * Edy Tri Baskoro, ITB, Indonesia
   * Heather Gavlas, University of Vermont, USA
   * George Havas, University of Queensland, Australia
   * Curt Lindner, Auburn University, USA

Check out all the details on the website http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~njc/awoca/awoca2002 .

Contacts: Diane Donovan dmd@maths.uq.edu.au Abdollah Khodkar ak@maths.uq.edu.au

The 27th ACCMCC The 27th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing (27ACCMCC) will be held at Newcastle University, NSW, from 9-13 DECEMBER 2002. The confirmed invited speakers at the moment are

   * Dragos Cvetkovic(University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia),
   * Mike Fellows(University of Newcastle, NSW),
   * Mirka Miller (University of Newcastle, NSW),
   * Alex Rosa (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada)
   * Jozef Siran (Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia) .
   * Jerrold Griggs(University of South Carolina, U.S.A.) .

The 27ACCMCC has been advertised on http://www.ams.org/mathcal/ http://at.yorku.ca/amca/index.htm and http://www.netlib.org/confdb/Conferences.html.

The 27ACCMCC web page is http://www.cs.newcastle.edu.au/~accmcc/.

Ljiljana Brankovic lbrankov@cs.newcastle.edu.au.

Graph Theory of Brian Alspach

FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT

Mark your calendars for this! Brian Alspach is 65 next year and we are celebrating his birthday in a spectacular "Graph Theory of Brian Alspach" conference from May 25 to 29 of 2003 on the beautiful campus of Simon Fraser University.

Visit the conference web site: http://www.cs.uleth.ca/gtba

A very useful website giving upcoming conferences in Coding, Cryptography and Effective Algebra AND their deadlines is http://www-rocq.inria.fr/codes/Anne.Canteaut/annonces.html .

RECENT NEWS OF CMSA MEMBERS and others :

Prof. Dr. Hans-Dietrich Gronau wrote last October:

It's a pleasure to inform you that Ron Mullin was honoured on Thursday October 11, 2001, with the degree Dr. h.c. (doctor rerum naturalium honoris causa) of the faculty of Mathematics and Sciences of the Rostock University in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Discrete Mathematics and a longstanding and fruitful collaboration with our university.

Nick Hamilton and Matt Brown are both returning to Australia from Belgium, and are on the job hunt! Nick writes:

Announcement:

In order to alleviate John Howard's concerns about the mathematical brain drain, Nick Hamilton and Matt Brown would like to announce their return to Australia after a fabulous world tour of Belgium during the last two years. Thus they are now considering opportunities for gainful employment in the academic area in Australia, preferably in the Brisbane (Nick) or Adelaide (Matt) areas. So if you know of any opportunities in lecturing mathematics arising in the nearish future they would appreciate an email from you : nick@cage.rug.ac.be and mbrown@cage.rug.ac.be. If you would like to have a look at their CVs they can be found on Nick's web page at http://cage.rug.ac.be/~nick where you can also see some outrageously cute pictures of Nick's son Edan. Email now to avoid the rush.

News from Cheryl Praeger at the University of Western Australia:

Csaba Schneider has accepted a two year extension of his postdoctoral position here.

Michael Giudici (from QMW) will begin a 2 year postdoctoral position here in February. [QMW is Queen Mary and Westfield, University of London; while checking this, I noted on the web that this is now referred to as merely Queen Mary, University of London. So has all trace of Westfield gone? Ed.]

Anton Betten (from Bayreuth) will complete his postdoc position here in April and will move to take up a tenurable post at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

Alice Niemeyer has a beautiful baby boy called Paolo (born July) who entertains us at research meetings.

Josef Siran (Bratislava) will visit for two months March-April.

Xin Gui Fang (Peking) will visit for four months (March-June)

Akos Seress (Ohio) will visit Feb 10 - March 18

Vladimir Trofimov (Novosibirsk) will visit for two months from approximately October.

K.S. Vijayan was promoted recently to Associate Professor.

Sanming Zhou graduated PhD with Distinction at a ceremony in September 2001.

News from David Glynn:

David writes (Friday 11 Jan 2002): I have resigned my Senior Lectureship at the University of Canterbury and from 1 Jan 2002 am looking for a job, preferably in Australia or Europe. My most stable email address at the moment is probably dglynn@mac.com. (You will be glad to hear that the weather is like winter here at the moment, with 52mm of rain in 1 hour in Wellington yesterday.) Kia ora, David Glynn

News from Kevin McAvaney in Oman:

Kevin McAvaney at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman hosted Peter Horak from Kuwait University for a week of graph theory during the holy month of Ramadan. Peter gave an interesting department seminar entitled "Graph theory as an integral part of mathematics" which included some delightful applications in analysis. A return visit by Kevin is planned for a week in the (northern) spring semester.

A masters program in mathematics has been launched at SQU. Kevin led the design of the program which consists of 8 courses and a thesis. Last semester he taught the course Combinatorics which is based on the book "Aspects of combinatorics" by Victor Bryant (CUP 1992). He is teaching the undergraduate elective course Graph Theory this semester, the first time it too has been offered.

Vasyl Ustymenko was recently appointed as Associate Professor in the Department of Maths and Stats at SQU. He has a passion for algebraic and geometric construction of graphs of large girth and their application in the design of communication networks and cryptography. He has demonstrated his new encryption system CRYPTIM at international conferences in Melbourne, Wollongong, Auckland, and Berlin.

News from Andrew Blinco from the University of Queensland:

As part of my studies towards a PhD I spent the six months from July to December 2001 overseas. I spent most of that time employed as a graduate teaching assistant at Auburn University, Alabama, which involved grading exam papers, and carefully pronouncing words such as "cyclic" and "processing" while in front of a class. I also took advantage of the excellent graduate-level graph theory courses offered at Auburn University.

I presented talks at the British Combinatorial Conference at the University of Sussex in July (where I played in an informal Kirkman medallists versus non-Kirkman medallists soccer match), at Illinois State University in September (where I drove a tractor at the El-Zanati farmstead), the Mid-West Conference on Combinatorics, Cryptography and Computing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (they have gaming machines by the gates in the airport!), and attended the Clemson Mini-Conference at Clemson University, South Carolina (and fell into a river in a nearby national park).

A big thank-you to John and Sarah Holliday of Auburn University, not only for being excellent research partners, but also for their eagerness to show me the sights and delights of the "Deep South", most notably the automated doughnut shop in Montgomery, Alabama.

I found the experience to be tremendously rewarding and would encourage other students to pursue any opportunities.

News from Abdollah Khodkar who has returned to the University of Queensland:

I was invited to the Department of Mathematics, Illinois State University (ISU), as a Visiting Professor for the Fall Semester, 2001. I taught two second year subjects, Discrete Mathematics and Abstract Algebra, during my stay at ISU. Parallel to teaching, I did some research with Professor S.I. El-Zanati and Dr C. Vanden Eynden on the Oberwolfach Problem. I gave two talks at ISU, a talk at the University of Illinois, a talk at the Fifteenth Mid-West Conference on Combinatorics, Cryptography and Computing (MCCCC) at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and two talks at Sharif University of Technology, Iran.

I am now working in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Queensland as a Research Officer.

Congratulations to Peter Adams at the University of Queensland, who says:

Peter was awarded a University of Queensland Excellence in Teaching award in late 2001, predominantly for teaching mathematics in a non-intimidating manner to lots of undergraduate students who are terrified of it. In 2000, he won a University of Queensland Research Excellence award. This is the first time a member of the University has won such awards for both teaching and research.

Perhaps coincidentally, Peter has been promoted to Senior Lecturer (as of 1st Jan 2002).

Anne Street has sent news from Brenton Gray:

Brenton and Meredith Gray have recently returned back to Brisbane after 2 years in the Philippines. Their first child Daniel Gray was born in the Philippines and their second child is expected to be delivered in Brisbane around May. Apart from eating far too much, they loved their time in Cebu where Brenton worked as a volunteer financial consultant. They hope to now remain in Brisbane for the next few years.

News from Jim MacDougall at the University of Newcastle:

Jim has just been promoted to Senior Lecturer, as from 1 January 2002. (Congratulations Jim!)

Jim also announces two visitors to Newcastle in 2002: Roger Eggleton, mid May - Mid August Wal Wallis, early June - early August.

News from Mirka Miller at the University of Newcastle:

Mirka Miller at the University of Newcastle has Nora Hartsfield visiting her for about six weeks. Mirka writes: "Nora is from Western Washington University and she is a co-author (with Ringel) of the book "Pearls of Graph Theory". She will be visiting me for about 6 weeks - in case you would like to get in touch with her and/or invite her to give a seminar at your university while she is in Australia."

Mirka can be contacted at mirka@cs.newcastle.edu.au.

EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES :

Mark Ellingham has sent in the following:

Non-tenure track position in Graph Theory and Combinatorics

Department of Mathematics, Vanderbilt University 1326 Stevenson Center, Nashville, TN 37240, U.S.A.

We invite applications for a non-tenure track position in graph theory and combinatorics beginning in Fall 2002. This is a two-year appointment at the assistant professor level, normally renewable for a third year. It is intended for a recent Ph.D. with demonstrated research potential and a strong commitment to excellence in teaching who would like to spend time in a department with a vigorous research atmosphere. To apply, send the following materials to Geneva Shilliday-Graph Theory and Combinatorics: a letter of application (including e-mail and fax number), the American Mathematical Society standardized application form fully completed, a curriculum vitae and research summary, and at least 3 letters of recommendation (one of which should specifically address effectiveness of teaching). Evaluation of applications will commence on January 7, 2002 and will continue until the position is filled.

Vanderbilt University is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer.

The AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS :

There is now a web page for the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics, and it has a search facility for past authors and for keywords in paper titles. See http://ajc.math.auckland.ac.nz/ . Instructions to authors are also available from this web site.

Volume 25 is at the printers and will appear in March 2002. The contents of volumes are listed at the above web page; Volume 25 will be listed shortly.

Submissions to the AJC may be sent to ajc@maths.uq.edu.au . Electronic submissions are encouraged. For paper submissions, please check the web page.

REMINDER: Deadline for next issue 31 May, 2002. Elizabeth Billington, Dept Maths, University of Queensland, Qld 4072. Fax: +61 7 3365 1477 ejb@maths.uq.edu.au