Ian Short and I have had the great pleasure of helping to supervise Victor Tomno, an MSc student at Moi University, Kenya. Victor has just submitted his thesis entitled The weakly sign symmetric P_{p,1}^+-matrix completion problem; a copy is here. I want to congratulate Victor on his hard work!

Victor’s work looks at the problem of taking a partial matrix (i.e. one which does not have all entries filled), and completing it to obtain a matrix with certain prescribed properties. In the course of this research, Victor used the theory of digraphs as well as a lot of linear algebra.

Ian and my involvement with Victor was facilitated by the Mentoring African Research Mathematicians programme of the London Mathematical Society; details of that scheme are here. Ian and I held a 2 year grant which allowed us to visit with, and host, Kenyan mathematicians, one of whom was Victor. The grant finished up in September 2018, although Ian and my connection with Kenya endures through supervision of two PhD students. We would like to thank the LMS for their financial support – this collaboration has been a very rewarding experience for all involved.

I should note that, in the end, Ian and I removed ourselves from the list of Victor’s official supervisors, as Moi University regulations only allowed for two supervisors on an MSc thesis. Nonetheless we are very proud to be associated with Victor’s excellent work.