Ahmad Abdi awarded an Alumni Gold Medal

At the fall 2014 convocation, Ahmad Abdi was awarded an Alumni Gold Medal for Outstanding Academic Performance in a master's program. Ahmad's MMath thesis, entitled The Cycling Property for the Clutter of Odd st-Walks was written under the supervision of Professor Bertrand Guenin.

In his master's thesis, Ahmad proved Paul Seymour's celebrated 1979 cycling conjecture for the important special case of lifts of graphic matroids. The cycling conjecture is concerned with the existence of certain integer flows in binary matroids. Ahmad's result (joint work with Guenin) is a very substantial generalization of an earlier result of Geelen's and Guenin's, and has applications to T-joins, multi-commodity flows, and graph colouring. Ahmad presented his work at the IPCO 2014 conference in Bonn in June 2014.

Ahmad commenced PhD studies in the Combinatorics and Optimization department on January 2014. His supervisor is Bertrand Guenin.