Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" rather than "continuous". Objects studied in discrete mathematics include integers, graphs, and statements in logic. By contrast, discrete mathematics excludes topics in "continuous mathematics" such as real numbers, calculus or Euclidean geometry. Discrete objects can often be enumerated by integers; more formally, discrete mathematics has been characterized as the branch of mathematics dealing with countable sets. However, there is no exact definition of the term "discrete mathematics".
Ronald Lewis Graham was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He was president of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and his honors included the Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
Ben Joseph Green FRS is a British mathematician, specialising in combinatorics and number theory. He is the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
Mathai Varghese is a mathematician at the University of Adelaide. His first most influential contribution is the Mathai–Quillen formalism, which he formulated together with Daniel Quillen, and which has since found applications in index theory and topological quantum field theory. He was appointed a full professor in 2006. He was appointed Director of the Institute for Geometry and its Applications in 2009. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In 2013, he was appointed the Elder Professor of Mathematics at the University of Adelaide, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Australia. In 2017, he was awarded an ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship. In 2021, he was awarded the prestigious Hannan Medal and Lecture from the Australian Academy of Science, recognizing an outstanding career in Mathematics. In 2021, he was also awarded the prestigious George Szekeres Medal which is the Australian Mathematical Society’s most prestigious medal, recognising research achievement and an outstanding record of promoting and supporting the discipline.
In projective geometry an oval is a point set in a plane that is defined by incidence properties. The standard examples are the nondegenerate conics. However, a conic is only defined in a pappian plane, whereas an oval may exist in any type of projective plane. In the literature, there are many criteria which imply that an oval is a conic, but there are many examples, both infinite and finite, of ovals in pappian planes which are not conics.
Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger is an Australian mathematician. Praeger received BSc (1969) and MSc degrees from the University of Queensland (1974), and a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1973 under direction of Peter M. Neumann. She has published widely and has advised 27 PhD students. She is currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Western Australia. She is best known for her works in group theory, algebraic graph theory and combinatorial designs.
Renfrey Burnard (Ren) Potts AO (1925–2005) was an Australian mathematician and is notable for the Potts model and his achievements in: operations research, especially networks; transportation science, car-following and road traffic; Ising-type models in mathematical physics; difference equations; and robotics. He was interested in computing from the early days of the computing revolution and oversaw the first computer purchases at the University of Adelaide.
Dwijendra Kumar Ray-Chaudhuri is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He and his student R. M. Wilson together solved the long-standing Kirkman's schoolgirl problem in 1968, which contributed to developments in design theory.
Frances Foong Chu Yao is a Taiwanese-American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist. She is currently a Chair Professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) of Tsinghua University. She was Chair Professor and Head of the Department of computer science at the City University of Hong Kong, where she is now an honorary professor.
Hendrika Cornelia Scott (Henda) SwartFRSSAf was a South African mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a professor at the University of Cape Town
Joseph Adolphe François Thas is a Belgian mathematician, who works on combinatorics, incidence geometry and finite geometries.
Tamar Debora Ziegler is an Israeli mathematician known for her work in ergodic theory, combinatorics and number theory. She holds the Henry and Manya Noskwith Chair of Mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University.
Anne Penfold Street (1932–2016) was one of Australia's leading mathematicians, specialising in combinatorics. She was the third woman to become a mathematics professor in Australia, following Hanna Neumann and Cheryl Praeger. She was the author of several textbooks, and her work on sum-free sets became a standard reference for its subject matter. She helped found several important organizations in combinatorics, developed a researcher network, and supported young students with interest in mathematics.
Louise Marie Ryan is an Australian biostatistician. She is a professor of statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, president-elect of the International Biometric Society, and an editor-in-chief of the journal Statistics in Medicine. She is known for her work applying statistics to cancer and risk assessment in environmental health.
Spyros Simos Magliveras is a Greek-born American mathematician and computer scientist.
James William Peter Hirschfeld is an Australian mathematician, resident in the United Kingdom, specializing in combinatorial geometry and the geometry of finite fields. He is an emeritus professor and Tutorial Fellow at the University of Sussex.
Jeanette Claire McLeod is a New Zealand mathematician specialising in combinatorics, including the theories of Latin squares and random graphs. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Canterbury, a principal investigator for Te Pūnaha Matatini, a Centre of Research Excellence associated with the University of Auckland, an honorary senior lecturer at the Australian National University, and the president for three terms from 2018 to 2020 of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia.
Lynn Margaret Batten was a Canadian-Australian mathematician known for her books about finite geometry and cryptography, and for her research on the classification of malware.
Jan Saxl was a Czech-British mathematician, and a professor at the University of Cambridge. He was known for his work in finite group theory, particularly on consequences of the classification of finite simple groups.
