ICA

Padraig Ó Cathain’s research concerns algebraic and combinatorial methods for designs, particularly Hadamard matrices, in addition to compressed sensing. The breadth of his research is remarkable at his early career stage, and is accompanied by substantial depth. As his nominators note, Padraig “brings a formidable command of a broad array of mathematical tools to his research, and deploys these tools with deftness and imagination.”

Peter Dukes’s research is in algebraic combinatorics, addressing theoretical aspects of designs, codes and graphs as well as applications in communications and computer science. He had published 45 journal papers. He is very active in undergraduate and graduate research supervision. His nominators describe him as “one of the leading combinatorialists in design theory and related areas of graph theory and coding theory”, and attest to his “brilliance in combining ideas from several different areas of mathematics to solve difficult problems in combinatorics and graph theory”.

Alex Rosa is the international authority on many topics in combinatorial design theory, including Steiner triple systems, Steiner quadruple systems, labellings, cycle systems, and colourings. He has published more than 200 refereed journal papers, written a major research monograph on Triple Systems, and founded the leading Journal of Combinatorial Designs. His work has opened new fields of research, breaking new ground repeatedly. For decades, Alex has emphasized the elegance of new ideas, and has freely shared his knowledge and ideas with his younger colleagues. As one nominator says, he is a “master at constructing designs” and an “inspiration”.

YueZhou has been awarded the 2016 Kirkman Medal

DrYueZhou has achieved excellent influential results with many co-authors and in broad areas, three of which are modified planar functions, substructures of finite projective planes and network codes. In addition to providing several important constructions in finite planes, Dr Zhou has improved a deep result of Leung and Xiang on the rank of unital codes. Dr Zhou has introduced the concept of nuclei for distinguishing inequivalent network codes, and used it to determine the full automorphism groups of twisted Gabidulin codes. His nominators summarize: “all his research visits were a great success” and “YueZhou is a brilliant mathematician”.

2015 Hall Medal award to Lijun Ji

Lijun Ji is a leader in the area of combinatorial design theory and its applications in information theory, focussing on three-wise balanced designs, Steiner quadruple systems with desired properties, large sets of triple systems, orthogonal arrays, covering arrays, group divisible 3-designs and their applications in optical orthogonal codes, authentication codes, constant weight codes, and frequency hopping sequences. He had published 51 articles in international journals. His nominators highlight his “outstanding contributions”, his “good taste in research problems”, and his “potential to be one of the thought leaders in [the] design theoretic community”.