Mathematician and physicist recognised by Australian Academy of Science awards
Congratulations to Professor Nick Wormald FAA and ARC Future Fellow Dr Amelia Liu on being recognised in the Australian Academy of Science Honorific Awards announced today.
Twenty-two researchers have been recognised nationwide with three from Monash University – Professor Wormald from the School of Mathematics, Dr Liu from the School of Physics and Astronomy, and Associate Professor David Frazier, from the Faculty of Business and Economics.
The honorific awards celebrate the achievements of the country’s leading minds and future superstars, spanning early-career recipients to those who have made career-long advancements in their fields
Professor Wormald is a world leader in the field of random graph theory, which combines advanced probability theory, combinatorics and theoretical computer science to produce deep insights into the nature of such large and complex networks.
The mathematics that he produces leads to greater understanding of the structure of real-world networks and to new methods for modelling them. This in turn leads to versatile tools of widespread use in algorithmic computer science and network optimisation, with other applications in physics, coding theory for communications, underground mine design and genetics. Professor Wormald is responsible for an impressive number of major breakthroughs in these areas and several standard methods used today were his invention. Professor Wormald has been recognised with the Academy’s Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal for his work.
Dr Liu’s research addresses the central conundrum of the ‘glass problem’ with the development of new experimental tools to measure the structure of glass. Glasses are materials that retain the disordered structure of liquid when they solidify during fast quenching from the melt. Fundamentally, it is not known why glasses are solid. When crystals solidify from the melt, their rigidity is linked to the symmetry of their atomic arrangements. In contrast, for a glass, the transition to a solid phase is not signalled by any obvious new order. In her most recent work, she demonstrated that even in globally disordered glass structures, there is a strong link between local structural symmetry and rigidity. Dr Liu’s new characterisation methods are a step towards engineering the properties of glasses from the atomic level. Dr Liu has been awarded the Academy’s John Booker Medal.
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