Conference: Contemporary Combinatorics 2007

University Of Memphis, Memphis TN

Investigators

Abstract

The aim of this conference is to bring together a group of outstanding mathematicians loosely connected to combinatorics, understood in the widest sense. The meeting will give a chance to mathematicians from the Mid-South to benefit not only from the lectures but also from personal contacts with the speakers. The main speaker at the conference is one of the most distinguished mathematicians today, Peter Lax of the Courant Institute in New York, the recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1986, the Wolf Prize in 1987, and the Abel Prize in 2005. Very accurately, he has been described as the most versatile mathematician today. He started in pure mathematics, but his greatest contributions have been to to the theory and application of partial differential equations and to the computation of their solutions. In particular, he constructed explicit solutions of nonlinear hyperbolic systems and identified classes of especially well-behaved systems. Lax is also a wonderful expositor, the author of several successful books, and a very approachable man. There will be several other exciting speakers at the meeting; they have been chosen because they are not only excellent mathematicians, but also wonderful expositors and very approachable people. They include Vitaly Bergelson of Ohio State University, who has made major contributions to ergodic theory, especially to recurrence theory stemming from the work of Furstenberg inspired by Szemeredi's theorem on arithmetic progressions; Yuval Peres from Microsoft Research and UC Berkeley, one of the most notable people working on combinatorial aspects of probability theory; Sasha Kostochka from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a very powerful mathematician who is carrying the torch for extremal combinatorics; Ralph Faudree from the University of Memphis, one of the most frequent collaborators of Paul Erdos, an expert on Ramsey-type problems; Stephanie Gerke of ETH in Zurich, who has done beautiful work on the interface of pure mathematics and computer science; Tom Trotter of Georgia Tech, one of the founders of the modern theory of partially ordered sets; Boris Pittel from Ohio State University, one of the best people working on probabilistic combinatorics; and Mark Walters from the University of Cambridge, England, who has proved much about random bootstrap percolation and random geometric graphs. Andr'as Gy'arf'as from Budapest will give a special 'public' lecture aimed at a very wide audience, including some of the best high school students from the area. Unlike the East Coast or the Bay Area on the West Coast, the Mid-South cannot boast of many high-level mathematical conferences; the Contemporary Combinatorics 2007 meeting in Memphis goes some way towards redressing the balance. The formula whereby personal contacts between the lecturers and the other participants is greatly encouraged was found to be very successful a year ago, and this what we hope to do at the 2007 meeting as well. There is no doubt that listening to lectures by Peter Lax, Vitaly Bergelson, Yuval Peres, and others, and, especially, talking to them during the conference will be very inspiring for young and established mathematicians alike. The NSF grant is absolutely vital for the success of the meeting; most of it will be used to help graduate students and senior mathematicians come to Memphis so that they can benefit from the lectures and the personal contact with the speakers.