News
Gordon Royle won a UWA Student Guild Student's Choice Award for excellence in teaching in Semester 2, 2014.
International Science, Mathematics and Informatics Olympiads. Cheryl Praeger will be guest speaker at the Blazer Ceremony for the Australian teams, Canberra, 15 June 2015.
Stephen Glasby has been invited to give a Séminaire Claude Chevalley at Universite Paris 7 on 25 June 2015.
Melissa Lee has been selected to participate in the 3rd Heidelberg Laureate Forum, to be held in Heidelberg, Germany, 23-28 August 2015.
Yian Xu started a PhD supervised by Michael Giudici and Cai-Heng Li.
Melissa Lee started an MPhil supervised by John Bamberg and Michael Giudici.
Kyle Rosa (supervised by Luke Morgan and Cheryl Praeger) and Adrian Petersen (supervised by Alice Devillers and Cheryl Praeger) have started Honours.
Co-tutelle PhD student Sabina Pannek and Jurgen celebrated the arrival of their son Timo on 18 December 2014.
Visitors
Frederico Augusto (PhD student, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil), February-May 2015.
Padraig Ó Catháin (Monash University), 30 March-3 May 2015.
Zhe Liu (Zhejiang University, China), 1 April 2015-31 March 2016.
Bart De Bruyn (Ghent University, Belgium), 6-28 April 2015.
Jason Semeraro (University of Bristol, UK), 7-28 April 2015.
Laura Mančinska (National University of Singapore), 13-24 April 2015.
David Roberson (National University of Singapore), 13 April-1 May 2015.
Alastair Litterick (University of Auckland, New Zealand), 16-26 April 2015.
Heiko Dietrich (Monash University), 27 May-5 June 2015.
István Kovács (University of Primorska, Slovenia), 18 May-10 June 2015.
Murray Elder (University of Newcastle), 19-23 May 2015.
CMSC Retreat
Almost the entire CMSC ventured to Yanchep in February for our annual retreat. Amongst the seventeen participants were staff, postdocs, students, and one visitor. During the three days of the retreat we enjoyed working collaboratively on many stimulating research problems, several of which are still being actively pursued via regular group research meetings. We also had an excellent two part course on matroid theory delivered by Irene Pivotto, and the retreat paper group, led by Mark Ioppolo. Time was found for several games of charades, the traditional soccer match (with accompanying traditional injury), and a restorative sauna visit!
SymOmega
SymOmega is a mathematical blog run by CMSC members John Bamberg, Michael Giudici and Gordon Royle.
Conferences
NZMRI 2015 Summer School: Algebra, Number Theory and Discrete Geometry, Nelson, New Zealand, 11-16 January, 2015. Cheryl Praeger gave a short lecture course on "Simple group factorisations and applications in combinatorics".
Banff International Research Station (BIRS) workshop on Groups and Geometries (15w5017), 3-8 May 2015. Luke Morgan and Cheryl Praeger will give talks entitled "Locally semiprimitive arc-transitive graphs" and "Classifying the 3/2-transitive permutation groups", respectively. Alice Devillers and Michael Giudici will attend.
CanaDAM 2015, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada, 1-4 June 2015. Irene Pivotto will give a talk in the "Matroid Theory" invited minisymposium, entitled "A first step in decomposing near-regular matroids".
8th Slovenian Conference on Graph Theory, Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, 21-27 June 2015. Michael Giudici will be a plenary speaker. Luke Morgan and Gabriel Verret will attend.
2015 PhD Summer School in Discrete Mathematics, Rogla, Slovenia, 27 June-3 July 2015. Gabriel Verret will attend.
Workshop on Matroid Structure, La Vacquerie, France, 5-10 July 2015. Irene Pivotto will give a talk.
25th British Combinatorial Conference, University of Warwick, UK, 6-10 July 2015. Joanna Fawcett will attend.
London Mathematical Society Regional Meeting, University of Warwick, UK, 7 July 2015. Stephen Glasby will attend.
Conference on finite simple groups and related topics, University of Warwick, UK, 8-10 July 2015. Stephen Glasby and Cheryl Praeger will attend.
Workshop on New Directions for the Tutte Polynomial, Royal Holloway University, UK, 11-14 July 2015. Irene Pivotto will give a talk.
Simple groups, representations, and related topics: A conference in honour of Martin Liebeck and Jan Saxl, University of Cambridge, UK, 13-15 July 2015. Cheryl Praeger will give an invited lecture. Joanna Fawcett will give a talk. Stephen Glasby will attend.
39th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing (ACCMCC), The University of Queensland, 7-11 December 2015. Gordon Royle is an invited speaker.
Papers
Published papers
A. Devillers and C. E. Praeger, Pairwise transitive 2-designs, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A 132 (2015) 246-270.
J. Bamberg, A. Devillers, J. B. Fawcett and C. E. Praeger, Locally triangular graphs and rectagraphs with symmetry, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A 133 (2015) 1-28.
M. D. E. Conder, C. H. Li and P. Potočnik, On the orders of arc-transitive graphs, Journal of Algebra 421 (2015) 167-186.
Y. Q. Feng, C. H. Li and J. X. Zhou, Symmetric cubic graphs with solvable automorphism groups, European Journal of Combinatorics 45 (2015) 1-11.
M. Giudici and L. Morgan, On locally semiprimitive graphs and a theorem of Weiss, Journal of Algebra 427 (2015) 104-117.
S. Guest, J. Morris, C. E. Praeger and P. Spiga, Affine transformations of finite vector spaces with large orders or few cycles, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 219 (2015) 308-330.
L. Morgan, P. Spiga and G. Verret, On the order of Borel subgroups of group amalgams and an application to locally-transitive graphs, Journal of Algebra 434 (2015) 138-152.
J. Morris, P. Spiga and G. Verret, Automorphisms of Cayley graphs on generalised dicyclic groups, European Journal of Combinatorics 43 (2015) 68-81.
P. Potočnik, P. Spiga and G. Verret, Bounding the order of the vertex-stabiliser in 3-valent vertex-transitive and 4-valent arc-transitive graphs, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B 111 (2015) 148-180.
E. Swartz. A construction of a partial difference set in the extraspecial groups of order p^3 with exponent p^2, Designs, Codes and Crytpography 75 (2015) 237-242.
Accepted papers
J. Bamberg and T. Penttila, Completing Segre's proof of Wedderburn's little theorem, to appear in Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society.
P. J. Cameron and C. E. Praeger, Constructing flag-transitive, point-imprimitive designs, to appear in Journal of Algebgraic Combinatorics.
R. Chen, M. DeVos, D. Funk and I. Pivotto, Graphical representations of graphic frame matroids, to appear in Graphs and Combinatorics.
B. P. Corr, T. Popiel and C. E. Praeger, Nilpotent-independent sets and estimation in matrix algebras, to appear in London Mathematical Society Journal of Computation and Mathematics.
N. I. Gillespie, M. Giudici, D. R. Hawtin and C. E. Praeger, Entry-faithful 2-neighbour transitive codes, to appear in Designs, Codes and Cryptography.
B. Guenin, I. Pivotto and P. Wollan, Displaying blocking pairs in signed graphs, to appear in European Journal of Combinatorics.
F. Pfender and G. F. Royle, Quartic graphs with every edge in a triangle, to appear in Journal of Graph Theory.
C. E. Praeger and C. Schneider, The contribution of L. G. Kovács to the theory of permutation groups, to appear in Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Submitted papers
J. A. Al-bar, A. N. Al-kenani, N. M. Muthana and C. E. Praeger, Finite edge-transitive oriented graphs of valency four with cyclic normal quotients.
J. Araujo, W. Bentz, P. J. Cameron, G. F. Royle and A. Schaefer, Primitive groups and synchronization.
J. Bamberg, J. De Beule and F. Ihringer, Weighted intriguing sets of finite of polar spaces.
J. Bamberg, M. Lee and E. Swartz, Unifying the known infinite families of relative hemisystems on the Hermitian surface.
S. P. Glasby, F. Lübeck, A. C. Niemeyer and C. E. Praeger, Primitive prime divisors and the n-th cyclotomic polynomial.
L. Morgan and C. M. Roney-Dougal, A note on the probability of generating alternating or symmetric groups.
P. Spiga and G. Verret, Vertex-primitive digraphs having vertices with almost equal neighbourhoods.