Brendan McKay
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brendan Damien McKay (b. October 26, 1951 in Melbourne, Australia) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU). He has published extensively in combinatorics.
McKay received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Melbourne in 1980. His thesis, titled "Topics in Computational Graph Theory" was written under the direction of Derek Holton.[1]
One of McKay's main contributions has been a practical algorithm for graph isomorphism and its software implementation NAUTY (No AUTomorphisms, Yes?). Further achievements include proving with Stanisław Radziszowski that the Ramsey Number R(4,5)=25, proving with Radziszowski that no 4-(12,6,6) combinatorial designs exist, determining with Gunnar Brinkmann the number of posets on 16 points, and determining with Ian M. Wanless the number of Latin squares of size 11.
Outside of this specialty, McKay is best known for his collaborative work with a group of Israeli mathematicians that criticizes the Bible code hypothesis by arguing that the patterns in the Bible that supposedly indicate some hidden message from a divine source or have predictive power can be just as easily found in other works, such as War and Peace. Their work is frequently used to challenge Michael Drosnin's arguments about a special Biblical code.
His Erdős number is 1.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Home page at the Australian National University
- Plantri and Fullgen, programs for generation of certain types of planar graphs, developed by Brinkmann and McKay
- [1] Excerpt from a transcript of the debate between Drosnin and McKay, in October 1997
