Graduate Student Combinatorics Conference

Auburn University, Auburn AL

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides funds to support the running of the 2014 Graduate Student Combinatorics Conference (GSCC) to be held at Auburn University from April 4 to 6, 2014. This will be the 10th annual conference held in this well-established series. The main purpose of this conference is to bring together graduate students in combinatorics with the following goals: to educate participants about the many areas of combinatorics; to share current research topics and open questions; to have participants meet and network with fellow combinatorics graduate students from across the country; and to provide the opportunity to work together on current research. This format also allows for vertical integration in that young graduate students who are just beginning their graduate careers are able to meet and learn from more senior graduate students about their experiences in and approaches to doing research. This conference is unique in that it is both designed specifically for graduate students, and it is organized and run essentially by the graduate students themselves. Combinatorics faculty at Auburn and the invited speakers will act as mentors for the students through this process. Giving young researchers the opportunity to come together to share their ideas and methods with each other and to learn about different areas of combinatorics is a major theme of this conference. There is a multitude of areas of research in combinatorics, including graph theory of many types, design theory, coding theory, enumeration, and set systems. Many schools have a specific focus and their graduate students are not aware of problems or proof techniques from other areas. This conference is designed to help graduate students appreciate the breadth of combinatorics, with students from many different backgrounds presenting and sharing their results and proof techniques in an informal supportive environment. In so doing, these graduate students are likely to forge professisonal relationships which we expect to extend well into their post-graduate careers, thereby adding to the mix of creative research in subsequent years.