Ian Wanless
Ian Murray Wanless (born 7 December 1969 in Canberra) is an Australian mathematician and a professor at Monash University. His research focuses on combinatorics, especially Latin squares, graph theory and matrix permanents.
Wanless went to Phillip College and represented Australia at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1987 in Cuba. He earned a PhD in mathematics from the Australian National University in 1998, with a thesis titled “Permanents, matchings and Latin rectangles” supervised by Brendan McKay.
His career path includes a postdoctoral position at Melbourne University (1998–1999), a junior research fellowship at Christ Church, Oxford (1999–2003), and a research position at the Australian National University (2003–2004). He was a senior lecturer at Charles Darwin University in 2005. Since 2006 he has been at Monash University, and he was promoted to professor in 2014.
Wanless has received distinguished fellowships from the Australian Research Council, including a QEII Fellowship (2006–2010) and a Future Fellowship (2011–2014). He won the Kirkman Medal in 2002 and the Hall Medal in 2008 from the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications. He was awarded the Victorian Young Tall Poppy Award in 2008 and the Australian Mathematical Society Medal in 2009. He is a life member of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia and has served as its president twice (2007–2009 and 2014).
In addition to his research, Wanless is the Editor in Chief of the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics and sits on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of Combinatorial Designs. He coauthored the Latin squares chapter in the CRC Handbook of Combinatorial Designs and wrote the chapter on matrix permanents in the CRC Handbook of Linear Algebra.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 01:43 (CET).