just another maths blog
I rarely give talks using Beamer theses days, but the majority of the talks I see at conferences and in seminars, do. Gordon wrote a long time ago about the ubiquity of the beamer navigation symbols and how one simple line in the header of your file makes them vanish. My pet peeve recently has … Continue reading "Aspect ratio in Beamer"
We are advertising a 3 year postdoctoral position at the University of Western Australia to work at the interface of finite geometry and Ramsey theory. The project is led by me at UWA, Anurag Bishnoi at TU Delft, and Sam Mattheus at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. It is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project. … Continue reading "Postdoctoral Research Position in Finite Geometry and…
In a post a few years ago, I described how to install nauty on an iPhone using an app that provides a Linux shell. A new release of nauty is imminent and testing revealed that a few things have changed since then, and so the instructions need a mild update. In particular, I just went … Continue reading "nauty for your iPhone – update"
This is a follow-up to the work some of us at UWA have been doing on subproblems to do with the “synchronising hierarchy” of permutation groups. In an earlier post, we announced the discovery of synchronising groups of diagonal type. The definitions of synchronising/separating/spreading came about from the study of synchronising words for finite-state automata. … Continue reading "Spreading…
Geertrui Van de Voorde from the University of Canterbury (NZ) visited us in November 2022 for two weeks, one week of which I had covid, but we managed to begin a project which would later become a paper (together with Jesse Lansdown). This was continued by my visit to Christchurch in January (supported by Geertrui’s … Continue reading "Visit to Christchurch, and Bruen chains"
I’ve just returned to Perth after giving one of the plenary talks at the “10th Slovenian Conference on Graph Theory” held in small ski-resort town of Kranjska Gora. I had never been to Slovenia before and hadn’t realised how spectacularly beautiful it is. Lush green forests, steep mountains and azure alpine lakes complemented with a … Continue reading "Graph Theory at Kranjska Gora"
I am currently on sabbatical, and the longest research visit is occurring now, at the Technical University of Delft. My host is none other than Anurag Bishnoi, who I have long collaborated with. My trip began in mid-April with a delightful conference in Eindhoven: “Combinatorics in Digital Communication”. This conference’s premise was to bring people … Continue reading "Sabbatical in the…
So my first international trip since Covid happened has been to a CS/Maths Research Centre “Schloss Dagstuhl” located in a fairly rural area in Germany. Similar to various other research centres around the world, the idea is to gather together a bunch of academics for a week in a location with few external distractions, have … Continue reading "Pushing Limits At Dagstuhl"
How often have you been out somewhere, maybe at a restaurant or pub, and suddenly needed to generate some graphs, or determine the canonical labelling of a graph that has come up in conversation, only to be foiled because you don’t have your laptop with you. Not often, you might say. But just in case, … Continue reading "nauty for your iPhone"
Recently, Michael Giudici, Jesse Lansdown, Gordon Royle and I have constructed a couple of examples of synchronising groups that are radically different from the known examples. You can find the details in our preprint here. What is a synchronising group? The definition came about from the study of synchronising words for finite-state automata. Motivated by … Continue reading "Synchronising…