Yudhi Bunjamin selected for prestigious forum in Germany

We are proud to report that Mathematics PhD student Yudhi Bunjamin has been selected to attend the 9th Heidelberg Laureate Forum to be held in Heidelberg, Germany, over five days in September 2022.

One of the most prestigious networking conferences for young researchers in maths and computer science, the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) is a networking conference where 200 carefully selected young researchers in mathematics and computer science spend a week interacting with laureates of the disciplines. These include recipients of the Abel Prize, ACM A.M. Turing Award, ACM Prize in Computing, Fields Medal and Nevanlinna Prize.

Established in 2013, the HLF is organised annually by the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation.

Applicants are subject to a very highly competitive selection process, hand-picked by international experts who are appointed by the following award-granting institutions: The Association for Computing Machinery, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the International Mathematical Union. Each successfully completed application is reviewed by at least three international reviewers, with the top 100 candidates in each discipline issued an invitation.

Yudhi Bunjamin has been a Casual Academic in the School of Mathematics and Statistics since 2017. His PhD is supervised Prof Catherine Greenhill, Dr Diana Combe and Dr Julian Abel. Prior to his postgraduate research, he undertook a Bachelor of Science (Advanced Mathematics), majoring in Statistics at UNSW.

Yudhi’s research is primarily in combinatorial designs, with a particular focus on block designs. Most of his PhD work has been on group divisible designs (GDDs). His research is mainly focused on the development of computational techniques for the construction and enumeration of small GDDs as well as the use of recursive constructions to prove the existence of some infinite families of GDDs.

Yudhi has been the School’s Outreach Coordinator since 2020. He won the 2019 B. H. Neumann Prize, which is awarded for the most outstanding talk delivered by a student at the Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society. He also hosts The Neumann Talk podcast, where he interviews past winners of the B.H. Neumann Prize, and he coordinates a team of staff and students of the School of Mathematics and Statistics in the podcast’s production.

 A very big congratulations to Yudhi for this impressive achievement! We wish him all the very best for his trip to Heidelberg.