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Showing posts from August, 2017

Ancient Tablet May Show Earliest Use of This Advanced Math

From National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/08/ancient-babylonian-trigonometry-tablet-plimpton-322-video-spd/ By  Sarah Gibbens PUBLISHED  AUGUST 24, 2017 For nearly 100 years, the mysterious tablet has been referred to as Plimpton 322. It was first discovered in Iraq in the early 1900s by Edgar Banks, the American archaeologist on which the character Indiana Jones is thought to have been largely based. It was later bought by George Arthur Plimpton in 1922 and has been called the Plimpton 322 tablet ever since. Now researchers from the University of New South Wales are calling it one of the oldest and possibly most accurate trigonometric tables of the ancient world. Findings published in the journal  Historia Mathematica , the official journal for the International Commission on the History of Math, reveal how researchers dated the ancient clay tablet and came to conclusions about its use.  The tablet is arranged in a series of 15 rows

News update as sent to the membership

Hello, There are some news items and updates to pass along to you. First, certificate presentations to ICA medal winners have taken place this year at the Southeastern Conference in Boca Raton in February, at the Shanghai Conference in May, and at CanaDAM in Toronto in June. Photographs of the presentations will appear in upcoming issues of the Bulletin. Future presentations are scheduled to take place at the Irsee Conference in September and the ICC in Melbourne in December. However, the most exciting news relating to medals is that we now have *actual medals*, which have been struck and engraved, for all the medal winners in the period 2010-2016. So future presentations will include a medal as well as a certificate. Medal winners who have already received a certificate will receive their medal at some future date. Please submit your nominations for 2017 medals to Charlie Colbourn by the end of 2017. The medals committee is seeking nominations of outstanding researchers to continue

5th ICC in Melbourne, December 4-9, 2017

http://www.monash.edu/5icc/ The 5th International Combinatorics Conference (5ICC) will be held at Monash University in Melbourne on 4-9 December 2017. The ICC is held approximately every 10 years, and incorporates the annual ACCMCC meeting of the   Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia . Provisional list of invited speakers Bill Chen , Nankai University Maria Chudnovsky , Princeton University Charlie Colbourn , Arizona State University Marston Conder , University of Auckland David Eppstein , University of California, Irvine Joanna Fawcett , Cambridge University Jacob Fox , Stanford University Daniela Kühn , Birmingham University Barbara Maenhaut , University of Queensland Brendan McKay , Australian National University Alexander Scott , Oxford University Paul Seymour , Princeton University Balázs Szegedy , Rényi Institute Le Anh Vinh , Vietnam National University

2015 Kirkman Medal award to Padraig Ó Cathaín

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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.”

2014 Hall Medal award to Peter Dukes

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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”.