The Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (ICA) Medals Committee recently announced the recipients of its 2022 medals.

Ziqing XIANG, Associate Professor of the Department of Mathematics at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), was awarded the 2022 Kirkman Medal in recognition of his outstanding contributions in the fields of design theory, algebraic combinatorics, and graph theory.

In the award speech, the ICA commented on Prof. XIANG’s work: “Ziqing XIANG has made significant contributions in several areas of combinatorics, namely, design theory, algebraic combinatorics, and graph theory. He also has done work in representation theory. Combining algebraic and number theoretic techniques with computer explorations, he has solved a number of longstanding open problems in design theory and algebraic combinatorics. For example, he solved Delsarte and Siedel’s conjecture on a Fisher type lower bound for the size of relative t-wise balanced combinatorial designs”.

They added that Prof. XIANG and his coauthors generalized Seymour and Zaslavsky’s result on the existence of t-designs on a path-connected topological space equipped with good measure to the existence of t-designs on an algebraically path-connected space equipped with good measure.

Prof. Ziqing XIANG joined the Department of Mathematics at SUSTech in 2022, and teaches the Fields Honor Class at the University.

The ICA was established in 1990 to promote the development of combinatorics and its applications.

The Kirkman Medal is awarded to scholars who have graduated with a Ph.D. within four years and have made outstanding research achievements. There are no more than two recipients each year.

In addition to Ziqing XIANG, Qing XIANG and Caiheng LI, Chair Professors of the Department of Mathematics at SUSTech, received the Kirkman Medal in 1999 and 1998, respectively.

Related link: http://www.the-ica.org/medals.php