kirkman.html

About the Kirkman Medal

From the Bulletin of the Institute for Combinatorics and its Applications (the international body that serves the world of combinatorics):

The Kirkman Medal recognizes outstanding work by ICA members in their early research careers; it is not an award for an excellent PhD thesis. At most 3 Kirkman medals per year may be given. Recipients must have received their doctorates during [the four years prior to the award]. Nominations should be made by two Fellows of the ICA, and should be accompanied by a curriculum vitae and a letter explaining the importance of the nominee's research.

PAST KIRKMAN MEDAL WINNERS
1994	R. Craigen (University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge Alberta) J. Jedwab (Hewlett-Packard, Bristol England)
1995	Darryn Bryant
1996	Greg Gudin Patric Ostergard
1997	Makoto Mtsumoto Bernhard Schmidt
1998	Peter Adams Cai Heng Li
1999	Nicholas Hamilton Qing Xiang
2000	Michael Raines (Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo)
2001	Matthew Brown (University of Adelaide, Australia; Ghent University, Belgium) Alan Chi Hung Ling (University of Waterloo?) Ying Miao (Concordia University)
2002
2003
2004
2005

My apologies for incomplete information about some recipients. I hope to complete this page with the full citation for each recipient and links to personal pages -- alas, when there is time...For now the citations for Jonathan and me will have to suffice.

Citations (From the ICA Bulletin)

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 been 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 nonexistence results for weighing matrices. His work on complex Golay sequences, as well as his work on multiplciation 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.

Johathan Jedwab received his Master's degree from Cambridge Univesity and completed a doctorate at Royal Holloway College of the University of London, under the direction of Fred Piper, in 1991. Despite being only a part-time doctoral student, he completed his thesis in a record three years. Since that time, he has been employed at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, where he is involved in seven pending patents relating to the communication of digital information. At HP, Jonathan has put his deep knowledge of combinatorics to many practical purposes. His work on the HP "bit error rate tester" was particularly innovative.

Despite the fact that he is working outside academia, Jonathan has made fundamental contributions to the theory of difference sets and perfect binary arrays. He has made extraordinary progress in using diverse mathematical areas to contribute to the theory of difference sets. One expert labelled his construction that showed that every abelian 2-group of order 2^2a+2 and exponent less than 2^a+3 has a difference set as "the only completely satisfactory result in the theory of difference sets." Among other important results which he discovered, or in which he played a major role are: the non-existence result establishing that the exponent of the group is not a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a difference set; characterization of groups that can contain a McFarland difference set; a structure theorem that determines precisely what Hadamard difference sets must look like for primes other than 2 or 3. Recently he has discovered a new family of parameters that have difference sets; this is the first new parameter family containing difference sets that has been found in 20 years; it includes as subfamilies almost all known families of difference sets, and it yields an infinite family of new groups that contain a McFarland difference set. This major breakthrough will have an important unifying effect in the study of difference sets.

Jonathan Jedwab has made substantial contributions in both practical research and theoretical combinatorics; he is already recognized as a leading expert in the theory of difference sets.