International Conference on Cycles in Graphs

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

An "International Conference on Cycles in Graphs" will be held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee from Wednesday, May 30th to Saturday, June 2nd, 2012. Graphs are abstract mathematical models of networks, and graph theory forms an essential part of the theoretical background for much of our modern information infrastructure, and for many modern methods of optimizing activities such as scheduling and transportation. Cycle problems appear in many places, including in questions of great practical importance such as the Traveling Salesman Problem. Cycles are a fundamental topic in graph theory, and this topic has many subareas, including conditions for hamilton cycles and their generalizations; pancyclicity; circumference; cycle decompositions; cycles in graphs with algebraic structure; cycle double covers; weighted cycle problems; cycles in random, sparse or dense graphs; and cycle spaces. Recently there have been significant advances in a number of these subareas, and it appears to be an opportune time to gather together workers in this area to share ideas. This conference should allow participants to review recent progress on important open problems, determine the best directions for further work, and discuss possible new avenues of investigation. The conference will be held in conjunction with the annual Shanks Lectures hosted by the Department of Mathematics at Vanderbilt University. The Shanks Lecturer will be Daniela Kuehn of the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, who will give two fifty-minute talks as part of the conference. There will be six additional principal speakers, each giving one fifty-minute talk, namely Alan Frieze (Carnegie Mellon University), Penny Haxell (University of Waterloo, Canada), Deryk Osthus (University of Birmingham, UK), Kenta Ozeki (National Institute of Informatics, Japan), Paul Seymour (Princeton University) and Xingxing Yu (Georgia Institute of Technology). Other participants will give contributed talks of twenty to twenty-five minutes. We anticipate about 120 participants, and about 80 to 90 contributed talks, arranged in two or three parallel sessions. The local organizers are Mark Ellingham and Paul Edelman of Vanderbilt University. More detailed information about the conference may be obtained from the web site, <http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~shanks2012/>. This proposal supports attendance by principal speakers and other participants, particularly targeting those without other sources of federal support, early career researchers, women, disabled persons and minorities.