Vol. 19, No. 37

Aug. 10, 2000

UD mathematician wins 1999 Kirkman Medal

Qing Xiang, mathematical sciences, was awarded the 1999 Kirkman Medal by the Institute of Combinatorics and Its Applications (ICA) during the 25th Ohio State-Denison University Mathematics Conference. The medal is given to an outstanding member of the ICA in the early stages of his or her research career. The ICA has approximately 1,000 members in 38 countries around the world and awards no more than three medals per year. This year, only Xiang and Australian mathematician Nicholas Hamilton received medals. "I was happy about it and felt very encouraged. For a young person, I felt that my research had been recognized," Xiang said. An honoree must be nominated by two ICA fellows and have achieved a "significant body of high quality work." Combinatorics is the mathematics of determining the finite amount of possible configurations within a system or family of numbers. Xiang works with combinatorial design and coding theory. His work can be applied to transmitting data across channels experiencing interference. Xiang joined UD's Department of Mathematical Sciences in 1997, after two years as Bateman Research Instructor at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1995. -Barbara Garrison