Staff profile

Qualifications

• B.E.(Hons), B.Sc., M.Sc.St., University of Queensland.

• Doct. 3e cycle, Doct. D’Etat, U.S.T.L, Montpellier.

Teaching areas

• MAT1CNS Calculus and Number Systems.

• MAT3TA Topology and Analysis.

• MAT3LPG Linear Programming and Game Theory.

• MAT4GG Groups and Geometry.

Current Supervision

• PhD: Nhan Bao Ho.

• PhD: Ana Hinić-Galić.

Professional involvement

• Member of the University Higher Degrees Committee.
• Advisor for the BSc degree.
• Director 2010 AMSI Summer School.
• Head of Department for the three years during 2005-2007.
• Awarded a Carrick National Teaching Citation in 2007 for 'fostering mathematics students' development and encouraging their active engagement in mathematics, through high-level reading groups, seminars, enquiry driven research projects and joint publication'.

Research interests

• Low dimensional combinatorial geometry.
• Lie algebras and their cohomology.
• Topological dynamics of group actions.
• Differentiable group actions and foliation theory.

Recent publications and presentations

• Grant Cairns and Yury Nikolayevsky, 'Outerplanar Thrackles', to appear in Graphs and Combinatorics.

• Grant Cairns, Nhan Bao Ho and Tamas Lengyel, 'The Sprague-Grundy function of the real game Euclid', Discrete. Math. 311 (2011), 457-462.
  

• Grant Cairns and Yury Nikolayevsky 'Generalized Thrackle Drawings of Non-Bipartite Graphs', Discrete and Computational Geometry 41 (2009), no. 1, 119-134.

• Grant Cairns and Sebastian Jambor, 'The cohomology of the Heisenberg Lie algebras over fields of characteristic two',  Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 136 (2008), 3803-3807.

• Grant Cairns and Barry Jessup, 'Free submodules for the central representation in the cohomology of Lie algebras', Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 136 (2008), 1919-1923.