1994 Hall Medal awarded to Doug Stinson

 From BICA (15) 1995:

The 1995 Hall Medals of the ICA

The Hall Medals of the ICA are awarded to Fellows of the Institute who have not passed age 40 and who have already produced a distinguished corpus of significant research work. The Hall Medals were inaugurated in 1994, and the 1995 Hall Medals, the first to be granted, have been awarded to Ortrud Ruth Oellerman, Christopher Andrew Rodger, and Douglas Robert Stinson. We herewith give summaries of the much more extensive citations and publication lists that were supplied by the nominators of these three scholars.

Doug Stinson did his undergraduate work in Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo. After a master's degree at Ohio state, under Rick Wilson, he returned to Waterloo where he worked under Ron Mullin and produced an outstanding doctoral thesis on frames. After spending eight years as a University Research Fellow at the University of Manitoba, during which time he reached the rank of Full Professor, he moved to the University of Nebraska where he is currently a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering.

Doug Stinson has a phenomenal research record of some 180 papers that range in quality from excellent to superb. He started his research work young, and has been doing significant research ever since. He popularized the use of frames and holes in the construction of designs and used these concepts for a great deal of important work on the spectrum of skew squares, orthogonal Latin squares, and Howell designs. He also did fundamental work on starters, one-factorizations, orthogonal and perpendicular arrays, packings and coverings, applications of variance techniques to designs, and the use of coding theory in block designs. Indeed, one leading design theorist labelled his work as being done by "the best young design theorist in the world". In the mid eighties, Doug changed the emphasis of his research slightly to include combinatorial algorithms and complexity analysis in his results; many of the numerical results that he obtained using hill-climbing algorithms are impressive.

In the nineties, Doug has moved on to work in cryptology, and has produced many highly original papers on authentication and secrecy codes. His groundbreaking work helped make the importance of design theory known to both theoretical computer scientists and combinatoricists. Currently, Doug is exploiting new ideas about large sets, but he continues to write and work in all areas of design theory and cryptology. His research is marked by great breadth and depth, and he has remarkable contributions to theoretical design theory, algorithmic design theory, and theoretical computer science.