ʹڲƱ Sydney Mathematician Anita Liebenau wins 2025 Christopher Heyde Medal
Anita Liebenau wins early-career award from the Australian Academy of Science.
Published on the 08 April 2025 by Susannah Waters
.cropimg.width=700.crop=video.png "Anita Liebenau")
Associate Professor Anita Liebenau from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at ʹڲƱ Sydney has received the .
Awarded by the Australian Academy of Science, the medal honours outstanding research in the mathematical sciences by researchers up to 10 years post PhD.
The medal is offered in several different fields on a rotating basis. The 2025 award recognises exceptional contributions in Pure, Applied, Computational, and Financial Mathematics.
Associate Professor Liebenau is recognised internationally as a leading expert in extremal and probabilistic combinatorics. She has worked on enumeration problems of large discrete structures such as regular graphs, problems in Ramsey theory and combinatorial games played on graphs. Graphs serve as mathematical models of networks with wide-ranging real-world applications, including social networks, contact networks/disease spread, and transportation networks.
Among her many achievements, A/Prof Liebenau developed a breakthrough method for enumerating regular graphs, leading to the first progress since 1989. She has also proved important results on thresholds for games on graphs, and has made major contributions towards resolving the Erdős–Hajnal conjecture.
Professor Andrew Francis, Head of the ʹڲƱ School of Mathematics and Statistics, extended his congratulations to A/Prof Liebenau on receiving her award.
Winning the Christopher Heyde Medal is a just recognition of Anita’s deep and creative contributions to combinatorics, and is an indication of the esteem in which she is held by the mathematical community. Her contributions to mathematical research are exemplary, but just part of her achievements as a leading mathematician. We are very fortunate to have her as part of our team.
A/Prof Liebenau joined ʹڲƱ Mathematics and Statistics as a Lecturer in 2018 after holding Research Fellowships at the University of Warwick and Monash University. Her honours include three Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grants received in 2025, 2022 and 2018, a 2020 Early Career Excellence Award from ʹڲƱ Science, and an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award in 2017. She was promoted to Associate Professor at ʹڲƱ in 2024.
She joins a roll call of outstanding researchers in the School of Mathematics and Statistics who have received the Christopher Heyde Medal, including Vera Roshchina (2021), Zdravko Botev (2018), Catherine Greenhill (2015), David Warton (2014), and Josef Dick (2012).
Professor Catherine Greenhill, Head of Pure Mathematics at ʹڲƱ, commended A/Prof Liebenau on her latest accomplishment.
“It is great that Anita Liebenau's research has been recognised with the award of the Christopher Heyde Medal. Anita works in several different areas within combinatorics. Her work on the asymptotic enumeration of families of combinatorial objects such as graphs is extremely impressive, closing a huge gap in the literature and verifying a conjecture that had been open for nearly 30 years”, said Professor Greenhill.
“She has also made important contributions to problems in Ramsey theory, combinatorial games on graphs, and additive combinatorics.”
The award includes a medal crafted by the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra, and $6,000 prize money. A/Prof Liebenau will be conferred her award officially during the Australian Academy of Science’s annual prize-giving event in September at Science in the Shine Dome, Canberra.
Anita Liebenau