I’ve been part of the organising committee for the SMP Maths Graduate Seminar Series since the start of the semester. During a boots-on-the-ground door-knocking campaign, we realised that a few posters put up around the place would really boost our attendance. The main purpose is to reach the eyeballs of our colleagues who are less inclined to checking their emails, but of course it also imbues the series with a greater sense of professionalism. I’ve been in charge of poster design, and I’m proud of the work, so I’m going to share the results here.
Well, I’m not going to apply for any graphic design jobs any time soon! But I reckon it’s alright for a mathematician. You can see a rough template and theme developing over the semester. All the posters are produced with Inkscape, which I’ve had a real fondness for ever since Rhuaidi Burke recommended it to me earlier this year.
I can’t take credit for every element of creativity — I’m indebted to Wikimedia commons for some of the more complex graphics for which I lacked either the time or skills to create myself. I’m getting better and would like to expand my diagram production skills, and building off the work of those more competent than me is a great way to do that. I’m going to include the graphics I’ve used here so that you can infer by omission the work that is mine 🙂
I ‘m going to try to figure out how to make a diagram like the geodesic above, watch this space!
Yesterday, my first journal article was published in the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics! It’s completely open-access, so you can find the journal here and a pdf of the article here.
To celebrate, I thought I’d have a go at visualising some of the paper because, while I’m quite happy with the conciseness and completeness of the paper, I think some of the beauty has been obscured behind tables of integers.
In essence, the paper identifies a nice small object, and then gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a similarly nice object of different sizes. So I think it makes sense to focus on the nice small object that got everything started.
Below is an image of it, and I encourage you to play around with this interactive version on Desmos. It’s made up of 19 points (in black) and 57 triangles (coloured red, blue and green).
Here is a summary of the nice properties that define it:
Every unordered pair of points is the side of exactly one triangle. (Click on any line between a pair of points and it will highlight the rest of the triangle.)
For each point, there is a set of triangles (called an APC) which do not overlap in any points, and which includes every other point in one of the triangles. (Use the slider to select a point, and the APC which misses that point will be highlighted with filled-in triangles. Or just leave it to spin around!)
Every triangle appears in exactly two of these APCs. (This is a bit tricky to see, but notice how each APC has two triangles of each of the three colours? This means that as we spin around the APCs, there are exactly two rotations which will make the triangle we want appear.)
A set of triangles which satisfies (1) is called a Steiner triple system, or STS. They are very popular objects of study, and it is well known that they only exist if the number of points is one more than a multiple of 6. We call a set of triangles which satisfies (1), (2) and (3) an Almost resolvable when duplicated Steiner triple system, or ARDSTS. The rest of the paper can be summarised as achieving the following:
Show that an ARDSTS cannot exist with 7 or 13 points.
Building an ARDSTS for some small sizes (19, 25, 31, 37, 43, 49, 55, 61, 67, 73, 79, 85 and 103 points).
Building an ARDSTS for every other integer one more than a multiple of 6 by gluing together the ARDSTSs constructed in step 2 in a clever but not-so revolutionary way.
So we know that for every size where an ARDSTS can exist, one does exist. Nice! But… each example constructed in step (2) has the extra nice property that you can spin it around and the picture doesn’t change except for the labels of the points. (We call something with this symmetry cyclic.) This made them quite a lot easier to find on a computer, but the way we glue them together in step (3) ruins the symmetry. We suspect cyclic ARDSTSs exist for the bigger sizes as well, but we couldn’t prove it. So of course there’s always more work to be done!
You might not have noticed from the extremely professional façade I portray on here, but in the last couple of years I’ve picked up the extremely fun and rewarding hobby of handball. It has become a really large part of my life, so much so that I interrupted my PhD from July through December this year because of it. Let me show you why.
Club champs
In July I competed for the UQ Handball Club at the Australia and Oceania Club Championships for the second time. And unlike last year, where I sat on the bench and eagerly absorbed as much as I could from the side-lines, another year of training (and the fortune of being the only left-hander on the team) earned me the responsibility of serious playtime. Five tough games later, we managed to pull off something the club had been working towards for the better part of a decade – toppling Sydney Uni, the reigning champions since 2014, and winning the final against St. Kilda.
This also earned us the right to compete at the 2023 IHF Super Globe, the annual handball club world championships held in November. Celebration soon turned to anticipation as we realised the hard work and sacrifice we would have to put in to mix it with some of the best professional clubs in the world.
Prep
With just over three months to prepare, we had to get started straight away. Four on-court trainings, three gym sessions and three running sessions each week is a lot to ask of people who otherwise still have full-time jobs and families. To me, I could see no way to balance this with tutoring and PhD work. I had committed to a lot of tutoring and semester had already started, so the PhD had to go. I made the arrangements to pause the PhD, and committed to this potentially once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’m very grateful to my supervisors and course co-ordinators for being flexible, supporting and understanding.
The preparation was tough, but by the end of the program I felt stronger, fitter and a lot better at handball. Of course, I learned a lot about myself and what motivates me to work hard, so it was a worthwhile experience for that reason alone.
The competition
It was always going to be tough playing against some of the best players in the world, especially when we hadn’t played on a stage like this before. There were a lot of firsts: first time playing in front of thousands of spectators, all supporting the other team; first time getting a police escort; first time playing against professionals; first time losing by 40+ goals. But you learn a lot about how you can improve in these situations, so we’re excited to work hard to do it all again next year. We set ourselves a benchmark, and showed that an Australian-based team can perform on the world stage.
What I learned
Individually, I know I have a lot to work on over the next twelve months to help the team get back to this position next year, and then give a better showing of myself if we get there. I learned to be resilient in times of adversity, and I learned what matters to me and how to better manage my time next year so I can manage my PhD as well as handball. (Farewell tutoring!) Finally, I learned to embrace opportunities when they arise, and enjoy every moment.
Jack Neubecker 
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