News
In June, John Bamberg was presented with the 2017 Hall Medal of the ICA.
Kyle Rosa's Masters thesis was passed in March with distinction, and will be included on the Dean's List. Kyle was supervised by Luke Morgan and Cheryl Praeger.
Cheryl was a guest speaker at the Girls do the Math! event at UNSW on 16 May. She also gave a public lecture on May 17 and spoke at a Women in Mathematics and Statistics Lunch on May 17: “Professor Cheryl Praeger is the 2018 UNSW Sydney Women in Mathematics and Statistics Ambassador. While she is in Sydney she will be participating in the UNSW Sydney School of Mathematics and Statistics annual "Girls Do The Maths" day for high school girls and other events.”
Cheryl was a member of the Australian Delegation at the General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union at Sao Paolo, Brazil, July 29-31. She was also a member of the IMU Nominations Committee and the IMU Elections Committee. The Australian delegation published a report on the GA and ICM in the Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Cheryl was the Australian delegate at the Founding General assembly of the new International Science Council July 2-5, in Paris. The ISC is the new body formed after the merger of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and International Council for Science (ICSU).
Cheryl attended the International Congress of Mathematicians. She chaired the three invited lectures in Mathematics Education. She was MC and spoke at the Australian Reception: “A celebration of Australian Mathematics”. She was interviewed for Plus Magazine here: She contributed to, and approved, a video made by the Australian Academy of Science to celebrate Akshay Venkatesh’s Fields Medal: it was released after the Opening Ceremony and can be seen here. The facebook version has been viewed 158K times, and on twitter it has been retweeted more than 100 times.
Daniel Harvey joined the CMSC working with Gordon Royle on his ARC DP.
Emilio Pierro arrived and began a 12 month Research Associate position with Cheryl Praeger and Stephen Glasby.
Cheryl spoke at the a memorial event: “The Life, Work and Legacy of Maryam Mirzakhani” at the State Library of Queensland, organised on 20 August by the University of Queensland.
Saul Freedman's Masters thesis was passed, congratulations Saul! Saul will begin a PhD in St Andrews in January 2019. Saul was supervised by John Bamberg and Luke Morgan.
In August John Bamberg gave an on-stage presentation at the Perth Science Festival.
Yian Xu submitted her thesis entitled `Normal and non-normal Cayley graphs’.
Carlisle King arrived to start a postdoc position with Michael Giudici on his ARC DP. Welcome Carlisle!
Cheryl will attend the AASSA-IAP workshop “Promoting role of scientists and media in science and health communication: From Policy to Practice”, Association of Academies and Societies of Sciences in Asia (AASSA) Executive Board Meeting and she will be the Australian voting delegate at AASSA General Assembly, October 28-31, Bangkok, Thailand.
Sabina Pannek (co-tutelle with RWTH Aachen) submitted her PhD thesis. The viva is on December 10.
Jacob Morhall has completed honours under supervision of John Bamberg and Gordon Royle. His thesis is titled “Eigenvalue bounds on cliques and cocliques”.
In October, Cheryl Praeger's 70th Birthday was celebrated at the 3rd International Conference on Group Actions and Transitive Graphs in Shenzhen in China. Many of Cheryl's collaborators, friends and students were present and enjoyed a short conference with incredible hospitality at the Southern University of Science and Tecnology China, thanks to CaiHeng Li, Jiyong Chen, Zheng Guo, Hui Zhou, Binzhou Xia, and all the other organisers!
Cheryl Praeger Visiting Research Fellow
The 2019 fellow will be Natalia Maslova (Ural Federal University). Natalia will visit in the first half of 2019, we look forward to welcoming her!
CMSC Paper Prize
The 2018 paper prize was awarded to Binzhou Xia for his paper 'An infinite family of vertex-primitive 2-arc-transitive digraphs’ (with Michael Giudici and Cai Heng Li). Congratulations Binzhou!
Annual Research Retreat
The 2019 CMSC research retreat will be held in the first week of February 2019.
Conferences
Combinatorics 2018, 3-9 June, Arco, Italy. John Bamberg was an invited speaker.
Conference on Combinatorics and its Applications for Charlie Colborn’s 60th birthday, 14-16 July NTU Singapore. Cheryl Praeger was an invited lecturer.
Simple Groups: New Perspectives and Applications, August 29-31, University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Alex Bors, Stephen Glasby, Emilio Pierro and Carlisle King attended.
'Groups, Geometries and Representations' in honour of Dan Segal and Aner Shalev, September 3-7, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Cheryl Praeger gave an invited lecture. Stephen Glasby and Emilio Pierro attended.
Group Theory in Florence II, September 5-7, University of Florence, Italy. Alex Bors presented a poster, titled "Finite groups with a large automorphism orbit".
LMS-IMA Joint Meeting: Noether Celebration, 11 September, London, United Kingdom. Cheryl gave an invited lecture.
From permutation groups to model theory: a workshop inspired by the interests of Dugald Macpherson, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. 17-21 September, ICMS, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Cheryl Praeger gave an invited lecture.
Buildings 2018, 4-6 October, Munster, Germany. Alice Devillers attended.
The Third International Conference on Group Actions and Transitive Graphs, 12-14 October, South University of Science and Technology China, Shenzhen, China. Cheryl Praeger, Michael Giudici, Luke Morgan, Stephen Glasby, John Bamberg were invited speakers.
62nd Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, 4th-7th Dec, University of Adelaide, Australia. Saul Freedman, Michael Giudici, Stephen Glasby, Carlisle King, Luke Morgan will attend.
41ACCMCC in Rotorua, 10-14 December, The University of Waikato, New Zealand. John Bamberg, Daniel Harvey, Gordon Royle will attend.
Asia-Australia Algebra Conference 2019, January 21-25, 2019, Western Sydney University. Alex Bors, Michael Giudici and Cheryl Praeger will attend.
Groups and Combinatorics Seminars
Stephen Glasby maintains the website for our seminar series, please click here.
SymOmega
SymOmega is a mathematical blog run by John Bamberg, Michael Giudici and Gordon Royle.
Visits
For an up to date list of visitors to the CMSC, see here.
Gordon Royle visited Fengming Dong at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, September 9 - 28.
Stephen Glasby visited Frank Luebeck, Alice Niemeyer and Marvin Krings at RWTH Aachen, 15-30 October.
Alice Devillers visited Philippe Cara at VUB (Brussels), 22-26 October.
Michael Giudici, Luke Morgan and Emilio Pierro will visit Gabriel Verret at The University of Auckland in late November/December.
Alexander Bors will visit Aner Shalev at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in March 2019.
Papers
Published Papers
Marzieh Akbari Neil Gillespie, and Cheryl E Praeger. Increasing the minimum distance of codes by twisting. Electronic J. Combin. 25(3)(2018), #P3.36.
John Bamberg, Brian Corr, Alice Devillers, Daniel Hawtin, Irene Pivotto, and Eric Swartz, On the circular altitude of a graph, Australasian Journal of Combinatorics 72 (2018), no. 2, pp. 357 – 368.
John Bamberg, Stephen P. Glasby, Luke Morgan and Alice C. Niemeyer. Maximal linear groups induced on the Frattini quotient of a p-group. Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 222 (2018), no. 10, pp. 2931-2951.
John Bamberg, Jesse Lansdown and Melissa Lee. On m-ovoids of regular near polygons, Designs, Codes & Cryptography 86 (2018), no. 5, pp. 997 – 1006.
John Bamberg, Melissa Lee, Koji Momihara, Qing Xiang. A new infinite family of hemisystems of the Hermitian surface, Combinatorica 38 (2018), no. 1, pp. 43 – 66.
John Bamberg, Tomasz Popiel and Cheryl E Praeger. Simple groups, product actions, and generalised quadrangles. Nagoya Math. (2017) 1-40.
Timothy C. Burness and Michael Giudici. Locally elusive classical groups. Israel. J. Math., 225:343--402, 2018.
Benjamin Burton, Nalini Joshi, Cheryl E Praeger and Guillermo Pineda-Villavicencio. Australia and the International Congress of Mathematicians. Gazette, Aust. Math. Society, 45, Number 4, September 2018, 202-206.
Brian P. Corr and Cheryl E Praeger. Primary cyclic matrices in irreducible matrix subalgebras. J. Group Theory. 21(4),(2018) 667-694.
John D. Dixon, Cheryl E Praeger and Akos Seress. Strong involutions in finite special linear groups of odd characteristic. J. Alg. 413-447.498 (2018).
J. B. Fawcett, M. Giudici, C. H. Li, Cheryl E Praeger, G. Royle, G. Verret. Primitive permutation groups with a suborbit of length 5 and vertex-primitive graphs of valency 5. J. Combin. Theory, Series A 157 (2018), 247-266.
Neville Fowkes and Cheryl E Praeger. Obituary: Malcolm Hood. Gazette, Aust. Math. Society, 45, Number 1, March 2018, 31-34.
A. Gardiner and Cheryl E Praeger. Symmetric graphs with complete quotients, Australasian J. Combin. 71(3) (2018), 403-426.
Nick Gill, Neil I. Gillespie, Cheryl E Praeger and Jason Semeraro, Conway's groupoid and its relatives. Contemporary Math. 694,(2017), 91-110. In: "Finite Simple Groups: Thirty Years of the Atlas and Beyond" (Eds: Manjul Bhargava, Robert Guralnick, Gerhard Hiss, Klaus Lux and Pham Huu Tiep).
Michael Giudici, Stephen P. Glasby, Cai Heng Li, and Gabriel Verret. Arc-transitive digraphs with quasiprimitive local actions, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 223(3) (2018), 1217--1226.
C. S. H King, On the finite simple images of free products of finite groups. Proceedings of the LMS, (2018)
Emilio Pierro, The Hurwitz subgroups of E6(2), Arch. Math. (2018) 111: 457-469.
Accepted Papers
K. Auinger and A. Bors. Formations of finite groups with the M. Hall property. Accepted in Journal of Combinatorial Algebra.
John Bamberg, T. Harris, T. Penttila. On abstract ovals with Pascalian secant lines. To appear in J. Group Theory.
John Bamberg, Cheryl E Praeger, and Binzhou Xia. The covering radii of the 2-transitive unitary, Suzuki, and Ree groups. To appear in J. Group Theory.
Timothy C. Burness and Michael Giudici. On the Saxl graph of a permutation group. To appear Math. Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc.
Michael Giudici and S. P. Glasby and Cai Heng Li and Gabriel Verret, Arc-transitive digraphs with quasiprimitive local actions. Accepted in J. Pure Appl. Algebra.
Stephen P. Glasby, Alice Niemeyer and Tomasz Popiel. On the second-largest Sylow subgroup of a finite simple group of Lie type. Accepted Bull. Austral. Math. Soc.
S. P. Glasby, Cheryl E Praeger, Kyle Rosa and Gabriel Verret. Bounding the composition length of primitive permutation groups and completely reducible linear groups. J. London Math. Soc.
S. P. Glasby, Cheryl E Praeger, and Binzhou Xia. Norman involutions and tensor products of unipotent Jordan blocks. Accepted in Israel J. Math.
Stephen P. Glasby and Cheryl E. Praeger. On the parameters of intertwining codes. Accepted by Ars Math. Contemp.
Stephen P. Glasby, Frederico A. M. Ribeiro and Csaba Schneider, Duality between p-groups with three characteristic subgroups and semisimple anti-commutative algebras. Accepted. Proc. R. Soc. Edinb.
Nick Gill, Neil I. Gillespie, Cheryl E Praeger and Jason Semeraro. Conway groupoids, regular two-graphs, and supersimple designs. Seminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire.
Neil Gillespie, Padraig O Cathain and Cheryl E Praeger. Construction of the outer automorphism of S6 via a complex Hadamard matrix. Math Comput. Sci.
Moharram Iradmusa and Cheryl E Praeger. Derangement action digraphs and graphs. To appear in European J. Combin.
Luke Morgan, Joy Morris, Gabriel Verret, Digraphs with small automorphism groups that are Cayley on two nonisomorphic groups. Accepted by Art of Discrete and Applied Mathematics.
Geoffrey Pearce and Cheryl E Praeger, Generalised Paley graphs with a product structure. To appear in Annals of Combin.
Nemanja Poznanovic and Cheryl E Praeger Biquasiprimitive oriented graphs of valency four. Accepted in MATRIX Annals.
Submitted Papers
John Bamberg, Saul D. Freedman, Luke Morgan. On p-groups with automorphism groups related to the Chevalley group G_2(p).
John Bamberg, Arun Ram, Jon Xu. The thickness of Schubert cells as incidence structures.
John Bamberg, S.P. Glasby, Scott Harper, and Cheryl E. Praeger, Permutations with orders coprime to a given integer.
Alice Devillers, Joanna Fawcett, Cheryl E Praeger and Jin-Xin Zhou. On k-connected-homogeneous graphs.
Alice Devillers, Scott Harper and Luke Morgan. The distinguishing number of quasiprimitive and semiprimitive groups.
Neil I. Gillespie, Daniel R. Hawtin and Cheryl E Praeger. 2-Neighbour-Transitive Codes with Small Blocks of Imprimitivity.
Daniel J. Harvey, Gordon F. Royle, Chromatic roots at 2 and at the Beraha number B_10.
Daniel R. Hawtin and Cheryl E Praeger, Minimal binary 2-neighbour-transitive codes.
Luke Morgan, Cheryl E Praeger and Kyle Rosa. Bounds for finite semiprimitive permutation groups: order, base size, and minimal degree.