- Brendan McKay
Brendan Damien McKay (b.
October 26 ,1951 inMelbourne ,Australia ) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at theAustralian National University (ANU). He has published extensively incombinatorics .McKay received a
Ph.D. in mathematics from theUniversity of Melbourne in 1980. His thesis, titled "Topics in Computational Graph Theory" was written under the direction of Derek Holton. [MathGenealogy|id=35951]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 withStanisław Radziszowski that theRamsey Number R(4,5)=25, proving with Radziszowski that no 4-(12,6,6)combinatorial design s exist, determining withGunnar Brinkmann the number ofposets on 16 points, and determining with Ian M. Wanless the number ofLatin square s of size 11.Outside of this specialty, McKay is best known for his collaborative work with a group of
Israel i mathematicians that criticizes theBible code hypothesis by arguing that the patterns in theBible 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 challengeMichael Drosnin 's arguments about a special Biblical code.His
Erdős number is 1.References
External links
* [http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm Home page at the Australian National University]
* [http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/plantri/ Plantri and Fullgen] , programs for generation of certain types ofplanar graph s, developed by Brinkmann and McKay
* [http://www.thebiblecodes.com/claims/math/drosnin-mckay.htm] Excerpt from a transcript of the debate between Drosnin and McKay, in October 1997
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