Education
McKay received a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics from the University of Melbourne in 1980.
mathematician computer scientist
McKay received a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics from the University of Melbourne in 1980.
He has published extensively in combinatorics. His thesis, Topics in Computational Graph Theory, was written under the direction of Derek Holton. One of McKay"s main contributions has been a practical algorithm for the graph isomorphism problem and its software implementation NAUTY (Number AUTomorphisms, Yes?).
Outside of this specialty, McKay is best known for his collaborative work with a group of Israeli mathematicians that criticizes the Bible code hypothesis by arguing 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.
Their work is used to challenge Michael Drosnin"s arguments about a special Biblical code. He gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, on the topic of "Combinatorics".