Dr Marston Conder awarded the 2020 Euler Medal of the ICA

 

For immediate release                                                           Contact: Sarah Holliday           

June 4, 2021                                                                            Secretary of the ICA                                                                                                                Email:            sarah.holliday@gmail.com                                                                                        url:      the-ica.org     

Dr Marston Conder awarded the 2020 Euler Medal of the ICA

 

Euler Medals recognize distinguished lifetime career contributions to combinatorial research.

 

Dr. Conder was born and raised in the Waikato region, studied at Hinuera Primary, Matamata College and the University of Waikato, New Zealand.  He earned the DPhil at the University of Oxford (1980) on minimal generating pairs for permutation groups, under the supervision of Prof. Graham Higman FRS. Subsequently, he had postdoctoral fellowships at University of Otago (1981) and Universität Tübingen (1982).  He has held his academic position at University of Auckland since 1983, promoted to full Professor in 1993, and named Distinguished Professor in 2012.

 

Marston Conder has made many distinguished contributions to combinatorics over the last 40 years. He has a world-wide reputation for developing and applying techniques from combinatorial and computational group theory to answer questions and solve problems in a range of areas of mathematics with a particular focus on discrete objects (such as graphs, maps, polytopes, and Riemann surfaces) with maximum possible symmetry subject to given constraints. He has made many ground-breaking discoveries and answered many open questions in a wide range of topics, including graph symmetries, graph embeddings, regular and chiral maps, regular and chiral polytopes, as well as edge-partitions of graphs, higher-dimensional expander graphs, and binary Gray codes.

 

Dr. Conder has published more than 170 papers, supervised 15 PhD students, and is a frequent invited speaker at international conferences. In addition, he is renowned for the way in which he freely shares his knowledge and the results of his research with others, and in particular, for his repositories of discrete objects of particular kinds, which he found using a combination of theory and computation. These are widely used, and have been helpful not only in answering new research questions but also in leading to new discoveries.

 

The Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications is an international scholarly society that was founded in 1990 by Ralph Stanton; the ICA was established for the purpose of promoting the development of combinatorics and of encouraging publications and conferences in combinatorics and its applications.