Rate My Professor Brian Alspach

Professor Brian Alspach serves as an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer and Information Sciences (Mathematics) within the College of Engineering, Science and Environment at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He obtained his B.A. from the University of Washington in 1961, an M.S. in 1964, and a Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with Paul Kelly as his doctoral advisor. Alspach's academic career includes 33 years at Simon Fraser University, where he retired in 1998 after holding various positions and developing an industrial mathematics degree program. Since 1999, he has been an adjunct professor at the University of Regina, previously serving there as a professor from 1999 to 2010, and he joined the University of Newcastle as a conjoint professor in 2007. His research focuses on graph theory and combinatorics, encompassing graph decompositions, cycle covers, Hamilton paths and cycles in Cayley graphs, vertex-transitive graphs, circulant graphs, and applications to scheduling and designs. With approximately 136 publications and nearly 3,900 citations, key works include "Cycles of Each Length in Regular Tournaments" (1967, Canadian Mathematical Bulletin), "Isomorphism of Circulant Graphs and Digraphs" (1979, with T. D. Parsons, Discrete Mathematics), "Cycle Decompositions of Kn and Kn−I" (2001, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B), "Pancyclicity and Cayley Graphs on Generalized Dihedral Groups" (2016), and recent contributions such as "On the 2-Spanning Cyclability of Honeycomb Toroidal Graphs" (2024, Discrete Applied Mathematics) and "The Friedlander-Gordon-Miller Conjecture is True" (2017).

Alspach has mentored 13 Ph.D. students and received the Euler Medal from the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications in 2014 for his influential contributions to graph theory over five decades. A dedicated conference, "Graph Theory of Brian Alspach," celebrated his 65th birthday in 2003 at Simon Fraser University, reflecting his profound impact on the field. His ongoing research addresses problems like factor-invariant graphs, spanning cyclability in toroidal and Cayley graphs, and automorphism groups, demonstrating sustained activity in discrete mathematics.