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

• MAT1CLA Calculus and Linear Algebra.

• MAT3LPG Linear Programming and Game Theory.

• MAT4GG Groups and Geometry.

Supervision

• PhD: Nhan Bao Ho.

• PhD: Ana Hinić-Galić.

Professional involvement

• Head of Department (current).
• Director 2010 AMSI Summer School.
• Held an ARC Discovery grant during 2003-2005.
• 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'.
• Member of the La Trobe Curriculum Taskforce in 2008.

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 'Generalized Thrackle Drawings of Non-Bipartite Graphs', to appear in Discrete and Computational Geometry.

• 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.
• Christian Aebi and Grant Cairns,'Catalan Numbers, Primes and Twin Primes', Elemente der Mathematik, 63 (2008), 1-12.
• Grant Cairns and Thanh Duong Pham, 'An example of a chaotic group action on the plane by compactly supported homeomorphisms', Topology Appl. 155 (2007), 614-617.