Praeger completed her high school education at Brisbane Girls Grammar School. After graduating high school, Praeger went to the government vocational guidance section to inquire about how she could further study mathematics. The vocational guidance officer she spoke with tried to discourage her from studying mathematics further,[1] suggesting she become a teacher or a nurse because two other girls who came to him wanting to study maths were not able to pass their courses.[1] He reluctantly showed her an engineering course description, but she felt it did not have enough mathematics. So she left without getting much information that day, but did continue on to receive her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Queensland.
Having met several women on the mathematics staff during her undergraduate studies, the prospect of becoming a mathematician did not seem strange to her. During her first and second years she did honours studies in mathematics and physics, choosing to continue in mathematics after her second year.[1] After completing her education at University of Queensland she was offered a research scholarship at Australian National University (ANU) but chose instead to take the Commonwealth Scholarship to the University of Oxford and attended St Anne's College. At that point she knew she wanted to study algebra.
After earning her doctorate in 1973, she obtained a research fellowship at ANU. She had her first opportunity at teaching regular classes at the University of Virginia during the semester she worked there. Afterwards, she returned to ANU, where she met her future husband, John Henstridge, who was studying statistics. She was later offered a short-term position at the University of Western Australia, which turned into a long term position, where she currently works today.[1] In 1989 she received the degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Western Australia for her work on permutation groups and algebraic graph theory.
Career
Her career has been largely spent in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Western Australia. She was appointed full professor in 1983 and was head of the Department of Mathematics 1992–1994, inaugural dean of postgraduate research studies 1996–1998, chair Promotions and Tenure Committee 2000–2004, deputy dean of the Faculty of Engineering Computing and Mathematics 2003–2006, ARC Professorial Fellow 2007.[2] and ARC Federation Fellow in 2009.[3]
Praeger has supervised over 30 graduate students and in 1997 she supervised the Honours research work of Akshay Venkatesh who went on to win a 2018 Fields Medal, commonly regarded as the highest prize in mathematics.
Certificate of Merit of the Royal Humane Society of New South Wales for "actions involving a drowning, rescue at Batemans Bay on the 23rd November 1974" (1976).[5]
Companion of the Order of Australia for "eminent service to mathematics, and to tertiary education, as a leading academic and researcher, to international organisations, and as a champion of women in STEM careers". This is Australia's highest civic honour. (2021)[13]
Inaugural Ruby Payne-Scott Medal and Lecture of the Australian Academy of Science (2021).[14]
Appointed a Fellow of the International Science Council (2023).
Since 2014, the Women in Mathematics Special Interest Group of the Australian Mathematical Society bestows the Cheryl E. Praeger Travel Awards to female mathematicians.[15] Since 2017 the Australian Mathematics Trust has awarded the Cheryl Praeger Medal to the best performing female contestants in the Australian Mathematics Competition.[16]
Praeger has been a member of the Curriculum Development Council of the Commonwealth Schools Commission,[17] the Prime Ministers Science Advisory Council, WISET Advisory Committee to the Federal Minister for Science on participation of women in Science, Engineering, and Technology, UWA Academy of Young Mathematicians Lectures, the Western Australian School Mathematics Enrichment Course Tutor, and Data Analysis Australia Pty Ltd. She has also served on the Australian Federation of University Women (Western Australian Branch) and the Nedlands Primary School Council.[4] Between 1992 and 2019 she was a board member of the Australian Mathematics Trust. From 2001 to 2019 she chaired the Australian Mathematical Olympiad Committee.[citation needed] She is currently a member of the National Science and Technology Council that provides advice to the prime minister and the minister for science.[18]
Between 2014 and 2018 Praeger was foreign secretary of the Australian Academy of Science. She was elected as a Member-at-Large of the executive board of the Association of Academies and Societies of Sciences in Asia (AASSA) for 2016–18 and accepted an invitation to chair the AASSA Committee of Women in Science and Engineering (WISE). She is a Member of the executive committee of the Inter Academy Partnership - Science, 2017–19. Since 2019 she has been a member of the Committee for Freedom and Responsibility in Science of the International Science Council.[20]
Praeger promotes the involvement of women in mathematics by encouraging girls in primary and secondary schools with lectures, workshops, conferences and through the Family Maths Program Australia (FAMPA), which she was key in implementing in local primary schools.[4] She is currently Patron of the Mathematical Association of Western Australia.
Personal life
In August 1975 Praeger married John Henstridge in Brisbane. They have two children, James (1979) and Tim (1982).[1]
In addition to holding a doctorate in mathematics, she also holds an Associate in Music, Australia (AMusA) in piano performance and was a member of the University of Western Australia Collegium Musicum between 1977 and 1985. She has been a member of the Uniting Church in Australia, Nedlands Parish since 1977, functioned as an elder from 1981 to 1987, and as an organist/pianist since 1985. She lists keyboard music among her stronger interests along with sailing, hiking, and cycling.[4]
Research
Praeger published her first research paper in1970 while she was still an undergraduate. Since then she has become one of the most highly cited authors in pure mathematics, with (as of December 2022) over 450 publications total. She is known as a collaborator, with over 200 co-authors.
Praeger later went on to generalise the O'Nan–Scott Theorem to quasiprimitive groups.[24]
Praeger introduced normal quotients of graphs which allows the finite simple groups classification to be applied to analyse symmetric graphs and edge-transitive graphs as well as Cayley graphs. It is now a standard tool in algebraic graph theory.
With Peter M Neumann she developed and analysed the first randomised algorithm to recognise finite special linear groups. This led to the international matrix group recognition project and was extended to all finite classical groups by Praeger and Alice Niemeyer.
with Jason Fulman, Peter Neumann: A generating function approach to the enumeration of matrices in classical groups over finite fields, American Mathematical Society 2005
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John Griggs Thompson is an American mathematician at the University of Florida noted for his work in the field of finite groups. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970, the Wolf Prize in 1992, and the Abel Prize in 2008.
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In mathematical finite group theory, a rank 3 permutation group acts transitively on a set such that the stabilizer of a point has 3 orbits. The study of these groups was started by Higman. Several of the sporadic simple groups were discovered as rank 3 permutation groups.
In mathematics, the O'Nan–Scott theorem is one of the most influential theorems of permutation group theory; the classification of finite simple groups is what makes it so useful. Originally the theorem was about maximal subgroups of the symmetric group. It appeared as an appendix to a paper by Leonard Scott written for The Santa Cruz Conference on Finite Groups in 1979, with a footnote that Michael O'Nan had independently proved the same result. Michael Aschbacher and Scott later gave a corrected version of the statement of the theorem.
Michael Ernest O'Nan was an American mathematician, specializing in group theory.
Ruth Jeannette Williams is an Australian-born American mathematician at the University of California, San Diego where she holds the Charles Lee Powell Chair as a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics. Her research concerns probability theory and stochastic processes.
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.
Catherine Greenhill is an Australian mathematician known for her research on random graphs, combinatorial enumeration and Markov chains. She is a professor of mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, and an editor-in-chief of the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.
In mathematics, the Sims conjecture is a result in group theory, originally proposed by Charles Sims. He conjectured that if is a primitive permutation group on a finite set and denotes the stabilizer of the point in , then there exists an integer-valued function such that for the length of any orbit of in the set .
Colva Mary Roney-Dougal is a British mathematician specializing in group theory and computational algebra. She is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, and the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra at St Andrews. She is also known for her popularization of mathematics on BBC radio shows, including appearances on In Our Time about the mathematics of Emmy Noether and Pierre-Simon Laplace and on The Infinite Monkey Cage about the nature of infinity and numbers in the real world.
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.
Martin Liebeck is a professor of Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London whose research interests include group theory and algebraic combinatorics.
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↑ An O'Nan-Scott Theorem for Finite Quasiprimitive Permutation Groups and an Application to 2-Arc Transitive Graphs, Journal of the London Mathematical Society, Volume s2-47, 1993, Pages 227–239
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