Mirka Miller facts for kids

Mirka Miller (born Koutova, May 9, 1949 – January 2, 2016) was a brilliant Czech-Australian mathematician and computer scientist. She was very interested in graph theory, which is a special part of math that studies networks, and also in data security, which is about keeping information safe. She worked as a professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Mirka's Life Story

Mirka Miller was born on May 9, 1949, in a town called Rumburk in what was then Czechoslovakia. She was the oldest of five children. In 1968, she tried to leave Czechoslovakia but couldn't. She then started studying at Charles University. A year later, in 1969, she successfully left her home country and became a refugee in Australia.

Education and Sports

In Australia, Mirka went to the University of Sydney. She earned a bachelor's degree in both mathematics and computer science in 1976. While she was a student, she was also a talented volleyball player. She played for the New South Wales team and even for the Australia women's national volleyball team!

After university, she married an ornithologist (a bird scientist) named Ben Miller. She worked as a computer programmer for a big newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald. She also worked for NSW Parks and Wildlife on Lord Howe Island. During this time, she and Ben started a family and had a son.

Returning to Study

Later, Mirka separated from her husband. She decided to go back to university to study even more. She earned two master's degrees from the University of New England in 1983 and 1986. She then completed her PhD from the University of New South Wales in 1990. Her PhD research was about keeping information safe in large databases.

Teaching and Research Career

Mirka worked at the University of New England from 1982 to 1991. She then married another graph theorist named Joe Ryan. They both moved to the University of Newcastle. Mirka was a faculty member at the University of Newcastle from 1992 to 2004. For many years, she was the only woman in the Faculty of Engineering there, which was a big achievement!

She briefly moved to the University of Ballarat and then returned to Newcastle in 2008 as a research professor. She worked there until she retired in 2014 as a professor emeritus, which is a special title for retired professors. She also held a position at the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic starting in 2001.

Mirka Miller passed away on January 2, 2016. After her death, several special issues of scientific journals were published to honor her amazing work and contributions to mathematics and computer science.

Mirka's Contributions to Science

Mirka Miller made many important contributions to the fields of mathematics and computer science.

Books and Publications

She wrote two books about special kinds of graphs called magic graphs. These books are:

• Super Edge-Antimagic Graphs: A Wealth of Problems and Some Solutions (published in 2008)
• Magic and Antimagic Graphs: Attributes, Observations and Challenges in Graph Labelings (published in 2019, after her death)

Mirka wrote over 200 research papers during her career. She also supervised 20 students who were working on their PhDs before she passed away. She was still supervising six more students at the time of her death. She also helped start four different workshop series, which are like special conferences, about algorithms, graph theory, and networks. She was also very important in the history of graph theory in Indonesia, where she visited twice and helped six students get their PhDs.

McKay–Miller–Širáň Graphs

A special family of graphs is named after Mirka Miller and her co-authors, Brendan McKay and Jozef Širáň. These are called the McKay–Miller–Širáň graphs. They are a type of vertex-transitive graphs, which means they look the same from any starting point. These graphs are important because they have a special structure with a large number of connections relative to their size. One famous example of these graphs is the Hoffman–Singleton graph.