Gordon Preston Prize

The Gordon Preston Prize is awarded annually for the most outstanding student talk at the Australian Algebra Conference . The winner of the prize receives $300 and a certificate. The prize is named in honour of renowned semigroup theorist Professor Gordon Preston  (Monash University), who played an important role in the instigation of the annual conference known over the years as the Algebra Conference of Victoria, the Victorian Algebra Conference and the Australian Algebra Conference.

The Gordon Preston Prize was first awarded in 2006, with Professor Gordon Preston himself attending the conference and presenting the prize to the inaugural winner.

Rules of the Gordon Preston Prize

The rules for the prize and advice for speakers are given here and may be downloaded as a PDF file.

Winners of the Gordon Preston Prize

• • 2025 winner: Matthias Fresacher (Western Sydney University) - Categorical representation of DRC-semigroups

  • 2024 winner: Eileen (Xueyu) Pan (Monash University/University of Warwick, UK) – The primitive action of G2(q) on cosets of its maximal-rank subgroups

    • Honourable mention: Jerry (Qing) Shen (University of Technology, Sydney) – On the complexity of the epimorphism problem with dihedral targets

  • 2023 winner: Ðorđe Mitrović (University of Auckland, New Zealand) - Graph growth of transitive permutation groups

    • Honourable mention: Matthias Fresacher (Western Sydney University) –  Congruence lattices of finite twisted Brauer monoids

  • 2022 Winner: Alfilgen Sebandal (Mindanao State University) – A Confirmation on the Finite Graded Classification Conjecture of Leavitt Path Algebras

  • 2021 Winner: Edmund Heng (ANU) - Generalised braid groups, categorification and dynamics

    • Honourable mention: Jack Allsop (Monash) - Solution to a question of Falconer on quasigroup varieties

    • Honourable mention: Darryl Teo (UWA) - On the Intersection Multiplicity of Plane Curves

  • 2020 Winner: Alex Bishop (University of Technology, Sydney) – Towards a classification of group geodesic growth

  • 2019 Winner: Jason Brown (University of Melbourne) – A class of PL-homeomorphism groups with irrational slopes

  • 2018 Winner: Lauren Thornton (University of the Sunshine Coast) – Some results differentiating Kurosh-Amitsur and base radical classes. 

    • Honourable mention: Andrew (Yoong Kuan) Goh (University of Technology Sydney) – Pattern avoidance in stack sorting; 

    • Honourable mention: Simon Rigby (Ghent University, Belgium) – Tensor products of Steinberg algebras

  • 2017 Joint Winners: Becky Armstrong (University of Sydney) – Simple graph algebras,  and  Alex Casella (University of Sydney) – Understanding 3-manifolds by their character variety

  • 2016 Winner: Jon Xu (University of Melbourne) – The Thickness of Schubert Cells

• 2015 Winner: Christopher Taylor (La Trobe University) – Algebras of incidence structures: representations of regular double p-algebras

  • Honourable mention: Cameron Rogers (University of Newcastle) – Using random walk distributions for determining Folner sequences

• 2014 Winner: Joshua Howie (University of Melbourne) – The relative 1-line property for knot exteriors 

• 2013 Winner: Murray Smith (La Trobe University) – Game theoretic representations of semilattice-ordered semigroups

• 2012 Winner: Jon Xu (University of Melbourne) – Generalised n-gons and the Feit–Higman theorem

• 2011 Winner:  Michael Brand (Monash University) – Friedman numbers have density 1

  • • Honourable mention:  Nadiya Al Dhamri (La Trobe University) – Duality of quasivarieties of bands

• 2010 Joint Winners: Matthew Kotros (University of Melbourne) – Relative hyperbolicity of groups and relative quasiconvexity of subgroups, and Tharatorn Supasiti (University of Melbourne)  – On the asymptotic dimension of metric spaces

• 2009 Winner:  Kyle Pula (Monash University/University of Denver) – Products of all elements in a loop

  • • Honourable mention:  Maurice Chiodo (University of Melbourne) – Coverings of groups by proper normal finite index subgroups

• 2008 Winner:  Neil Saunders (University of Sydney) – Minimal permutation degrees of irreducible Coxeter groups

  • • Honourable mention:  Kerri Morgan (Monash University) – Chromatic factorisation of graphs

• 2007 Winner:  Shona Yu (University of Sydney) – The cyclotomic Birman-Murakami-Wenzl algebra

• 2006 Winner:  Neil Saunders (University of Sydney) – A class of examples for minimal degrees of direct products