1994 Kirkman Medal awarded to Robert Craigen

 From BICA (15) 1995:

The 1995 Kirkman Medals of the ICA

The 1995 Kirkman Medals of the ICA are awarded to members of the Institute who received their doctoral degrees in 1991, 1992, or 1993, and who have already produced a substantial amount of research work of exceptional quality. The Kirkman Medals were inaugurated in 1994, and the 1995 Kirkman Medals, the first to be granted, have been awarded to Jonathan Jedwab and Robert Craigen. We give summaries of the much more extensive citations and publication lists that were supplied by the nominators of these two outstanding young researchers.

Robert Craigen received his Bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia and both his Master's and Doctorate from the University of Waterloo; his supervisor for the Ph.D. (1991) was Larry Cummings. Since graduation, he has at the University of Lethbridge.

Robert Craigen has developed a very original method of composing matrices that he calls the "weaving method" and has used this method in the construction of Hadamard and weighing matrices. In the century since Hadamard's original conjecture concerning Hadamard matrices, there have been only two major advances in knowledge of the general existence of these matrices. The first was the Seberry theorem (1976); the second is a result of Craigen's that is even stronger than the Seberry result.

Craigen has also developed the theory of signed groups and has used it to give Hadamard matrices with cocyclic development; he has also used the representation theory of signed groups to find new non-existence results for weighing matrices. His work on complex Golay sequences, as well as his work on multiplication of an arbitrary number of sequences with zero autocorrelation, has led to the construction of new Hadamard matrices.

Robert Craigen is recognized as a leading expert in matrix composition, the theory of signed groups, and the study of (0,1) determinants. He has been invited to write three sections in the forthcoming CRC Handbook of Combinatorial Designs; this is a recognition of both his research achievements and his skill in lucid exposition.

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