Brendan McKay

Brendan Damien McKay (born 26 October 1951 in Melbourne, Australia) is an Emeritus Professor in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU). He has published extensively in combinatorics.

McKay received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Melbourne in 1980, and was appointed Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, Nashville in the same year (1980–1983). His thesis, Topics in Computational Graph Theory, was written under the direction of Derek Holton. He was awarded the Australian Mathematical Society Medal in 1990. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1997, and appointed Professor of Computer Science at the ANU in 2000.

McKay is the author of at least 127 refereed articles.

One of McKay's main contributions has been a practical algorithm for the graph isomorphism problem and its software implementation NAUTY (No AUTomorphisms, Yes?). Further achievements include proving with Stanisław Radziszowski that the Ramsey number R(4,5) = 25; proving with Radziszowski that no 4-(12, 6, 6) combinatorial designs exist, determining with Gunnar Brinkmann, the number of posets on 16 points, and determining with Ian M. Wanless the number of Latin squares of size 11. Together with Brinkmann, he also developed the Plantri programme for generating planar triangulations and planar cubic graphs.

Outside of his specialty, McKay is best known for his collaborative work with a group of Israeli mathematicians such as Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, together with Maya Bar-Hillel, who rebutted a Bible code theory which maintained that the Hebrew text of the Bible enciphered predictive details of future historical events. The paper in question had been accepted for publication in a scientific peer-reviewed journal in 1994. Their rebuttal, together with a paper written by an anonymous mathematician, argued that the patterns in the Bible that supposedly indicate some hidden message from a divine source or have predictive power can be just as easily found in other works, such as War and Peace. The discredited theory was taken up by Michael Drosnin. Drosnin was convinced of this theory when one of its exponents stated that the Torah predicted the Iraqi wars. He expressed his certainty publicly that such coded messages could not be found in any other work than the Bible, and, in an interview with Newsweek, he challenged:

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