Newsletter, January 2017

Buildings and Symmetry

The workshop "Buildings and Symmetry", Monday 25th September to Friday 29th September 2017, will be hosted at the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Western Australia, as part of the activities of the Centre for the Mathematics of Symmetry and Computation. The theme of the workshop is relatively broad, including any aspects of buildings and related objects - although as indicated by the title there is an emphasis on symmetries/group theory/Lie theory aspects. Organisers: Alice Devillers (local organiser), Bernhard Mühlherr, James Parkinson, and Hendrik Van Maldeghem

Cheryl Praeger Retirement Mini-Symposium

On April 13 (2017) there will be an all-day mini-symposium honouring the career of Cheryl Praeger, hosted at the University of Western Australia.

News

• Tomasz Popiel has taken up a temporary lectureship at Queen Mary University of London.

• John Bamberg is now a former Future Fellow. On 1 December 2016, he commenced a new role as a teaching and research staff member of the School of Mathematics and Statistics.

• Jesse Lansdown will be at RWTH Aachen University for 2017 as part of a cotutelle arrangement for his PhD.

• Our graduating Honours students Saul Freedman (thesis "Maximally symmetric p-groups" supervised by John Bamberg and Luke Morgan), Mark Perrin (thesis "The production of Conway groupoids" supervised by Michael Giudici and Cheryl Praeger) and Bohao Yao (thesis "Colouring triangle-free graphs" supervised by Gordon Royle) all received First Class Honours.

• Cheryl Praeger received a Euler medal for year 2011 from the ICA.

• Michael Giudici received a Hall medal for year 2012 from the ICA.

• Kyle Rosa won the best student talk prize of the 40th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing.

• Rebecca Waldecker (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) was awarded the 2017 Cheryl E Praeger Visiting Fellowship.

• Cheryl Praeger was an observer at the planning meeting, held at the Royal Society in London on 26 September 2016, for the Commonwealth Science Conference which will be held in Singapore in June 2017.

• Cheryl Praeger and Professor Andrew Homes, President of the Australia Academy of Science, were the Australian "ambassadors" at the World Science Day of the French Academy at the Louvre in Paris. They co-chaired an afternoon session on "Health and Demography" on 27 September 2016.

• Cheryl Praeger gave a welcoming address at the one-day workshop "Italian Scientists Down Under" organized by the Ambassador from Italy at the University of Western Australia on 4 November 2016.

• Cheryl Praeger chaired the opening session of the Indonesia-Australia Science Symposium at the Shine Dome, Canberra on 28 November 2016.

• Daniel Hawtin visited Wei Jin at the Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics in China.

• Luke Morgan spent four weeks in China as a CMSC ambassador. He visited Jicheng Ma (Chongching University of Arts and Science) and gave two talks. He also visited Cai Heng Li (South University of Science and Technology China) and gave a talk entitled "Local conjectures in graph theory and semiprimitive groups".

• Luke Morgan visited Joy Morris for two weeks at the University of Lethbridge in Canada.

• Cheryl Praeger gave a seminar entitled "Local transitivity properties of graphs and pairwise transitive designs" at Zhejiang University in China on 1 November 2016.

• Cheryl Praeger gave a colloquium lecture entitled "Coprime actions of finite groups" at the University of Bielefeld on 19 January 2017.

• Cheryl Praeger gave a research seminar entitled "Infinite permutation groups with all infinite normal subgroups transitive" at Mathematisches Institut Münster, Germany on 20 January 2017.

• Gordon Royle visited Fengming Dong at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

• Gordon Royle had a visit from Seongmin Ok of Korean Institute of Advanced Studies.

• Binzhou Xia visited Cai Heng Li for five weeks at South University of Science and Technology China.

• Cheryl Praeger has been invited to take over the role of Chair of the "Special Committee for Women in Science and Engineering" of the the Association of Academies and Societies of Sciences in Asia (AASSA). In connection with this she will attend the AASSA-SCJ Workshop on the "Role of Science for Inclusive Society" in Tokyo on 1-3 March 2017.

• Cheryl Praeger will attend a meeting (5-6 April) of the Executive Board for the Inter Academy Partnership in Halle, Germany.

Visitors

• Gabriel Verret (University of Auckland), 18 February-4 March.

• Cheryl E. Praeger Visiting Fellow: Rebecca Waldecker (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg), 25 February-19 March.

• Anurag Bishnoi (Ghent University), 19 March - 14 April.

• Ashraf Daneshkah and Syed Hassan Alavi (Bu-Ali Sina University), 11 March-2 April.

• Martin Liebeck (Imperial College London), 23 March-14 April.

SymOmega

SymOmega is a mathematical blog run by CMSC members John Bamberg, Michael Giudici and Gordon Royle.

Buildings and Symmetry

The workshop "Buildings and Symmetry", Monday 25th September to Friday 29th September 2017, will be hosted at the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Western Australia, as part of the activities of the Centre for the Mathematics of Symmetry and Computation. The theme of the workshop is relatively broad, including any aspects of buildings and related objects - although as indicated by the title there is an emphasis on symmetries/group theory/Lie theory aspects. Organisers: Alice Devillers (local organiser), Bernhard Mühlherr, James Parkinson, and Hendrik Van Maldeghem

Conferences

• 60th Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, Canberra, Australia, 5-8 December 2016. Michael Giudici, Cheryl Praeger, Kyle Rosa and Binzhou Xia gave talks.

• 40th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing, Newcastle, Australia, 12-16 December 2016. John Bamberg, Stephen Glasby, Daniel Hawtin, Kyle Rosa, Gordon Royle and Binzhou Xia gave talks.

• Workshop on Permutation Groups: Methods and Applications, Bielefeld, Germany, 12-14 January 2017. Michael Giudici and Cheryl Praeger are invited speakers.

• All Kinds of Mathematics Remind me of You: Conference to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of Peter J. Cameron, Lisbon, Portugal, 24-27 July 2017. Michael Giudici and Cheryl Praeger are invited speakers.

• Groups St Andrews 2017, Birmingham, UK, 5-13 August 2017. Stephen Glasby will attend.

• International Workshop on Algebraic Combinatorics, Anhui, China, 28-31 October 2016. Yian Xu gave a talk and Cheryl Praeger gave the final plenary lecture.

Papers

Published papers

• J. Bamberg, T. Popiel and C. E. Praeger, Point-primitive, line-transitive generalised quadrangles of holomorph type, Journal of Group Theory 20 (2017) 269-287.

• M. DeVos, D. Funk and I. Pivotto On excluded minors of connectivity 2 for the class of frame matroids, European Journal of Combinatorics 61 (2017) 167-196.

• S. Dolfi, R. M. Guralnick, C. E. Praeger and P. Spiga, On the maximal number of coprime subdegrees in finite primitive permutation groups, Israel Journal of Mathematics 216(2016) 107-147.

• M. Giudici, M. W. Liebeck, C. E. Praeger, J. Saxl and P. H. Tiep, Arithmetic results on orbits of linear groups, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 368 (2016) 2415-2467.

• M. Giudici and B. Kuzma, Realizability problem for commuting graphs, Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society 101 (2016) 335-355.

• S. P. Glasby, D. Flannery, C. E. Praeger and R. Stöhr Editorial to this special issue in memory of Laci Kovács, Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society 102 (2017) 1-2.

• S. P. Glasby, F. Lübeck, A. Niemeyer and C. E. Praeger, Primitive prime divisors and the n-th cyclotomic polynomial, Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society 102 (2017) 122-135.

• S. P. Glasby, J. Bamberg, T. Popiel, C. E. Praeger and C. Schneider Point-primitive generalised hexagons and octagons, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A 147 (2017) 186-204.

• C. H. Li, C. E. Praeger and C. Schneider Inclusions of innately transitive groups into wreath products in product action with applications to 2-arc transitive graphs, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 220 (2016) 2683-2700.

• P. M. Neumann, C. E Praeger and S. Smith, Some infinite permutation groups and related finite linear groups, Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society 102 (2017) 136-149.

• A. C. Niemeyer, G. Pfeiffer and C. E. Praeger, On the complexity of multiplication in the Iwahori-Hecke algebra of the symmetric group, Journal of Symbolic Computation 80(2017) 817-832.

• C. E. Praeger and C. Schneider, The contribution of L. G. Kovács to the theory of permutation groups, Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society 102 (2017) 20-33.

Accepted papers

• J. Al-Bar, A. Al-kenani, N. Muthana and C. E. Praeger, A normal quotient analysis for some families of oriented four-valent graphs, to appear in Ars Mathematica Contemporanea.

• J. Bamberg, J. B. Fawcett and J. Lansdown, Bruck nets and partial Sherk planes, to appear in Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society.

• J. Bamberg and M. Lee, A relative m-cover of the Hermitian surface is a relative hemisystem, to appear in Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics.

• J. Bamberg, M. Lee, K. Momihara and Q. Xiang, A new infinite family of hemisystems of the Hermitian surface, to appear in Combinatorica.

• N. Gill, N. I. Gillespie, C. E. Praeger and J. Semeraro, Conway's groupoid and its relatives, to appear in Contemporary Math (in Proceedings of the conference "Finite Simple Groups: Thirty Years of the Atlas and Beyond" celebrating the Atlases and Honouring John Conway, Princeton, November 2015).

Submitted papers

• J. Bamberg, A. Betten, P. Cara, J. De Beule, M. Neunhoeffer and M. Lavrauw, FinInG: a package for finite incidence geometry.

• J. Bamberg, J. Lansdown and M. Lee, On m-ovoids of regular near polygons.

• T. C. Burness and M. Giudici, Locally elusive classical groups.

• M. DeVos, J. McDonald, I. Pivotto, E. Rollová and R. Šámal, 3-Flows with Large Support.

• M. Giudici, S. P. Glasby and C. H. Li and G. Verret Arc-transitive digraphs with quasiprimitive local actions.

• M. Giudici, C. H. Li and B. Xia, An infinite family of vertex-primitive 2-arc-transitive digraphs.

• G. Pearce and C. E. Praeger, Generalised Paley graphs with a product structure.

• C. E. Praeger and C. Schneider, Uniform automorphisms of simple groups and inclusions of quasiprimitive groups of simple diagonal type.

• Gordon Royle, The Beraha number B10 is a chromatic root.