CombinaTexas: A Combinatorics Conference for the South-Central U.S.

Texas A&M Research Foundation, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract: The Principal Investigators are organizing a conference on combinatorics to be held at Texas A&M University in late March, 2000. The intent is to establish an annual combinatorics conference to be held each spring at a university in the South-Central United States. There are currently several regional combinatorics/graph theory conferences held annually, including the Southeastern Combinatorics Conference, the Midwest Graph Theory Conference, the Cumberland Conference in the Ohio River Valley, and the Smith Conference in Massachusetts. No similar series of meetings are currently being held in Texas or any of the surrounding states. At the same time, the number of combinatorialists in the region has been rising steadily in recent years, creating a need for a regular vehicle for communication. The conference series will strive to bring in speakers from diverse subfields of combinatorics, at varying career stages, and from different universities within the region, as well as a small number of distinguished speakers from outside the region. Speakers for the first talk include two international speakers (Guenter Ziegler of the Technische Universitaet Berlin and Dominic Welsh of Oxford University) as well as five speakers from the region (Margaret Bayer of the University of Kansas, Joseph Kung of the University of North Texas, James Oxley of Louisiana State University,William Trotter of Arizona State University, and Catherine Yan of Texas A&M University). The funds provided by the NSF will enable the proposers to offer stipends to graduate students and postdocs from other institutions to allow them to attend the conference as well as to provide domestic travel expenses and modest honoraria for the seven primary speakers. The growth of the combinatorics community in the region is reflective of the growth in the activity and importance of combinatorics in the last few decades. The proliferation of computer technology has only accelerated this trend, since combinatorics and discrete mathematics provide the foundations on which the theories and practices of computation are based. The speed of this growth and the breadth of the field's application increases the need for regular communication between researchers. This is especially true in this part of the country, in which the geographical distances between researchers impedes more impromptu communication. The format of the conference addresses these needs, encouraging broad-based talks from diverse subfields and including a poster session and other occasions for informal discussions.