Twenty-Fourth Cumberland Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory, and Computing

University Of Louisville Research Foundation Inc, Louisville KY

Investigators

Abstract

The Twenty-Fourth Cumberland Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing will be held May 12-14, 2011 at the Shelby campus of the University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. This is an annual conference that has been held every year since 1988 at varying venues; it brings together students and researchers from across the South Eastern U.S. region to discuss the latest advances in discrete mathematics and computer science. The conference theme is ``building bridges between the old and the new'', a theme that reflects our commitment to the support of the next generation of discrete mathematicians and computer scientists. This conference plays a unique role as a regional exchange for researchers of all levels, but young faculty and students are especially encouraged to participate. The conference topics are partially ordered sets, hypergraphs, extremal combinatorics, and applications of these, particularly to theoretical computer science and computational complexity. Applications of these topics span a broad spectrum of natural and social sciences, and form the theoretical foundation of modern information infrastructure. Combinatorial and graph-theoretic methods are used in problems of biology, computer science, ecology, statistical physics, chemistry, and logistics, including problems concerning transportation and communication networks such as cellular phone networks and the Internet. Computational complexity theory is a branch of computer science that seeks to categorize problems according to the resources required to solve them. In many cases, combinatorial tools are used to determine the optimal use of resources. The conference is expected to attract roughly 100 participants and scores of contributed talks. Four internationally-renowned researchers have accepted invitations to be principal speakers: Maria Axenovich (Iowa State University), Jeno Lehel (University of Memphis), Dhruv Mubayi (University of Illinois at Chicago), and William T. Trotter (The Georgia Institute of Technology). The conference is organized by a committee of seven people from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Louisville; the chair of the committee is André Kézdy. More information can be found at the conference web site: http://www.math.louisville.edu/Cumberland/