The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) is pleased to award the 2007 CMS Doctoral Prize to Dr. Lap Chi Lau. The award will be presented at the Society's Winter Meeting in London, Ontario (December 2007).

As a graduate student of Professor Michael Molloy, University of Toronto, Lap Chi Lau wrote a groundbreaking dissertation which attacks fundamental and difficult problems concerning connectivity in graphs. In particular, one of the most appealing results he proved was that for any set S of vertices and integer k in a graph G either there are k edge disjoint trees each of which contains all of S, or 26k edges hitting all such trees. One novel feature of his work is the use of the heavy machinery of exact combinatorial optimization techniques to obtain approximation algorithms. His results will surely lead to further significant developments in this area.

Lap Chi Lau received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2000 and his M.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 2003. He continued as a graduate student at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Michael Molloy and completed his Ph.D. in 2006. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

For more information, contact:

Dr. Graham P. Wright
Canadian Mathematical Society
Executive Director
director@cms.math.ca
(613) 562-5702

or

Dr. John Frederick Jardine
Chair, CMS Research Committee
Department of Mathematics
University of Western Ontario
chair-resc@cms.math.ca
(519) 661-3638