27 May 2022
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Story Leonie Bolleurs
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Photo Charl Devenish
Prof Tomas Vetrik, Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, recently delivered his inaugural lecture on the UFS Bloemfontein Campus.
His research area is graph theory, and he mainly focuses on the degree-diameter problem, graph indices, and metric dimension of graphs.
Research focus
According to Prof Vetrik, mathematics was always his favourite subject in school. He also excelled in maths at university and decided to enrol for a course on graph theory while working on his master’s degree. “I liked it, so I also chose topics from graph theory for my PhD thesis,” he says.
In his twenties and later in his early thirties – while his colleagues chose to teach more for an extra income, he chose to teach less and to focus on his research. This paid dividends, as he received a few scholarships while working on his PhD, one from his own country and two from foreign countries, resulting in him spending one semester at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, and two semesters at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He was the only postgraduate student from Slovakia to receive a scholarship from the Israeli government in 2006.
“I also spent some time at a university in the Czech Republic during my PhD studies, and for my postdoctoral research I stayed in Indonesia for three months in 2008,” he adds.
In 2014, at the age of 32, he was appointed Associate Professor at the UFS, after postdoctoral research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and working at the University of Pretoria. An NRF-rated researcher, he has published close to 75 research papers, a third of that as a single author in some of the most well-known journals in his area. Moreover, he was also research supervisor of three PhD and three master’s students.
International collaborations
In the eight years since his appointment at the UFS, Prof Vetrik has made research visits to universities from 14 different countries that have invited him for research collaborations.
“I am often overseas. I like working from different places. It is interesting to me, and it helps me to be productive,” says Prof Vetrik, explaining some of the inspiration behind his mathematical ideas.
In the next two years, he would like to study more general mathematical problems beyond his current research area.
He says he is addicted to his research. “It overshadows all my other interests.”
On the rare occasion when he is not working on his research, Prof Vetrik states that he has to keep himself busy. Unable to relax and do nothing, he likes to do sports of some kind or to travel.
“I am a simple person. I do not even have a TV at home. I use an old-fashioned mobile phone that cannot access the internet,” he says.