ICA

We have been robbed by an invisible enemy of our dear friend Izak, or Sakkie to some. We are sad beyond measure and still staggering at the loss. Izak was a solid human being, honest and sincere, how humans were intended to be. He was kind, he was quirky, he was endearing, he was playful, he was a huggable teddy bear. We remember his joy of life, his infectious smile and his charm. He loved the banter in the tearoom and the remarks that flew from here to there like a ping pong ball. Then the ball reached him and he reacted with the wittiest remark of all, leaving everyone in stitches. Izak was so, so clever, a cleverness that stretched beyond mathematics. He was a master of life skills, of words, of big picture thinking and humble at that. His trade was mathematics, a talent that was written about in the newspaper when he was only twenty and astounded academics at a conference. He studied the hard way, cycling after a day’s work to university to attend evening classes. He crafted his m...

43rd Australasian Combinatorics Conference  http://43acc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/ Due to the current wave of  the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, after consulting CMSA  we have decided to postpone 43ACC to December 2021. At this stage we are unable to confirm the exact dates, but it is likely that we will have 43ACC in early or middle December 2021.   (As usual we will avoid clash with AustMS Annual Meeting which usually takes place in early or middle December.)  We will update our website  http://43acc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/ soon to inform potential participants the delay of the conference. 

  I hope everyone is staying healthy during the ongoing pandemic. I would like to let you know about a few updates relating to the ICA. First, the ICA Office will be moving from Florida Atlantic University to the University of Minnesota-Duluth (UMD). Dalibor Froncek is working with Spyros Magliveras to effect the necessary changes, which will take place in the coming months. Spyros has decided to step back from his role as Registrar, and after consideration and a vote by ICA Council, the move to UMD was approved. We are of course very grateful to Spyros for his work as Registrar and his long-standing support of the the ICA. The next change concerns the Bulletin of the ICA (BICA). I am very pleased to announce that Ortrud Oellermann has accepted an invitation to become an Editor-in-Chief of BICA. Ortrud is a longstanding ICA Fellow and a Hall medal winner, and her expertise in graph theory will be valuable to BICA moving forward. Also in connection with BICA is the news that i...

  PETER BORWEIN 1953 - 2020 It is with a deep sense of loss that we write that Peter Borwein passed away on Sunday, August 23, 2020. Jennie, his wife of 39 years, was by his side. We will remember Peter as an embarrassingly proud father; deeply loving husband; protective brother, uncle, and son; and faithful friend. In 1980, at the age of 27, Peter started work as an assistant professor of mathematics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.   While he was there, he, his brother Jonathan Borwein and David H. Bailey of NASA wrote the 1989 paper that showed a proof for computing one billion digits of π. They won the 1993 Chauvenet Prize and Hasse Prize. He later went on to become Professor and Burnaby Mountain Chair at Simon Fraser University (SFU). In 1995, the Borweins collaborated with Yasumasa Kanada of the University of Tokyo to compute π to more than four billion digits. Borwein has developed an algorithm that applies Chebyshev polynomials to the Dirichlet ...