The Minister for Education (finally) announced the ARC Future Fellowships commencing in 2013 this morning, and simultaneously, the DECRA’s and Discovery Projects. Our research group missed out on a grant of the first and second kind, but we had success with two Discovery Projects:

1. Cheryl Praeger, Stephen Glasby, and Alice Niemeyer (“Finite linearly representable geometries & symmetries).
2. Gordon (“Real chromatic roots of graphs & matroids”)

I remember last summer when both grant applications were being written, and it was a lot of work for all involved, so it’s great to see that both have awarded to support cutting edge research.

Many of us just received the sudden news of the passing of Laci Kovács, who spent amost of his career at the Australian National University and retired around 2001. Laci was a student of Bernhard Neumann and supervised 18 graduate students.

My own personal interaction with Laci started in my honours year. I was lucky enough to have solved a problem in combinatorial group theory and I sent a draft of a paper to a dozen or so group theorists. Laci and I exchanged emails and I looked into the possibility of persuing a PhD with him, but what discouraged me from going to ANU was his plans to take long service leave, and possible retirement. Plus, I was also in contact with Cheryl Praeger who was effectively luring me to the west, and that’s what I eventually ended up doing. Laci ended up being one of my PhD examiners and took great interest in my work. He came to Perth at least a couple of times during my PhD and first postdoc, and we had long enjoyable discussions in my office, on politics (one of Laci’s pet subjects) and mathematics.

Laci was one of the integral members of the golden era of group theory at ANU, and he will be sorely missed by the GT-community.

Harald Helfgott, a friend of SymOmega, has only yesterday uploaded an article on the arxiv claiming a proof of the “Ternary Goldbach Conjecture”:

Every odd integer $n>5$ is the sum of three primes.

This is big news in number theory since it is one of the best results on the Goldbach Conjecture to date. The “Ternary GC” also had its origins in the letters of Goldbach and Euler in 1742, and is sometimes referred to as Goldbach’s weak conjecture, since if every even number greater than 4 is the sum of two primes, then by adding the number 3 to the two primes will result in every odd number greater than 5 being the sum of three primes.

A position here in the School of Maths and Stats at UWA has just been advertised.  It is a full-time continuing position as either an Assistant or Associate Professor (Level B/C)  and the school is looking for ` a generalist mathematician with excellent skills in teaching and learning to develop and deliver a range of first year units to students from across the University.’  More details are available at the link above and queries should be directed to the Head of School, Andrew Bassom.

We again have two new postdoctoral positions in the Centre for the Mathematics of Symmetry and Computation here at UWA, funded by two Australian Research Council Discovery Project grants. Both are two-year positions and in the field of finite permutation groups and graph symmetry. One position is on a grant held by Michael Giudici and the other is on a grant held by myself, Alice Devillers, and Cheryl Praeger.

The deadline for applications is 8th February (2013).

More details and instructions on how to apply can be found here (refs 4261 and 4262).

We have two new postdoctoral positions in the “Centre for the Mathematics of Symmetry and Computation” here at UWA, funded by two Australian Research Council Discovery Project grants. Both are two-year positions and in the fields of finite permutation groups and combinatorics. One position is on a grant held by myself and the other is on a grant held by John Bamberg and Cai Heng Li.

The deadline for applications is 27th April (2012).

More details and instructions on how to apply can be found here (refs 3962 and 3963).

We look forward to lots of applications from SymOmega readers.

The ARC Future Fellowships and Discovery Early Career Research Awards (DECRA) were announced today and mathematics did very well on a national level. Our combinatorial colleagues did especially well: Ian Wanless (Monash), Sanming Zhou (UniMelb) and Murray Elder (UNewcastle) got Future Fellowships, and Daniel Horsley (Monash) and Arun Mani (UniMelb) scored DECRA’s. Our School didn’t do so well though. Three of us missed out on a Future Fellowship and two missed out on a DECRA.

• Simon Guest is back in Perth on a six month contract, working with Cheryl (mainly).
• Şükrü Yalçinkaya has jus arrived in Perth on a 3 month contract, working with Cheryl and Ákos.
• Sylvia Ozols has started a PhD under the supervision of Michael Giudici and myself.

Good news. The dispute at the Journal of Group Theory noted earlier has been resolved. Chris Parker sent the following email to the group-pub-forum today.

```The complete editorial board of the Journal of Group Theory have
come to a negotiated settlement with the publishers Walter de
Gruyter. John Wilson will continue to act as the Editor-in-Chief.
Jim Howie, Linus Kramer and Chris Parker will act as Managing
Editors, supporting John. The key points of the agreement are:

Joint ownership of the journal title and distribution list.
journals to Oberwolfach.
A pledge to help third world countries to access the journal.

of high quality articles with main theme being  group theory
and its applications.

The editorial board is as follows:

Miklos Abert
Alexandre V. Borovik
Nigel Boston
Martin R. Bridson
Michel Broue
Francesco de Giovanni
Robert Guralnick
James Howie
Andrei Jaikin Zapirain
William M. Kantor
Evgenii I. Khukhro
Dessislava H. Kochloukova
Linus Kramer
Gunter Malle
Alexandre Yu. Olshanskii
Christopher W. Parker
Derek J. S. Robinson
George Willis
John S. Wilson

From, Linus Kramer, James Howie, Chris Parker and John Wilson.```

We can now go back to submitting articles there.