6th Lake Michigan Workshops on Combinatorics and Graph Theory

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports travel for participants in the 6th Lake Michigan Workshop on Combinatorics and Graph Theory, held at the Department of Mathematics at the Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI) on the weekend of April 6-7, 2019. The workshop will benefit graduate students and junior researchers in the field of discrete mathematics, working at institutions in the area around Lake Michigan. It will be built around two sets of three tutorial lectures, focusing on classical techniques and results that the speakers feel are under-represented in typical graduate course sequences, and on emerging techniques on which the speakers are particularly qualified to expound. There will also be some short talks by younger faculty members. There will be ample time reserved to allow new research collaborations to commence, and active collaborations to continue. Junior participants will establish valuable connections with more senior colleagues, and receive guidance from them in a relaxed and informal environment. Combinatorics and Graph Theory are two very active areas of research within the broader field of Discrete Mathematics, with important ties to disciplines such as statistical physics and network science. In the immediate vicinity of Lake Michigan there are a large number of researchers and students working on a variety of graph theoretical and combinatorial problems. This workshop will bring many of these people together. Through tutorial lectures, short talks, an open problem session, and informal collaboration time, the workshop will train beginning researchers in important classical and emerging techniques of Combinatorics and Graph Theory. The tutorial speakers will be Bernard Lidicky, Iowa State University (who will speak on flag algebras and their applications) and Jacques Verstraete, University of California, San Diego (who will speak on extremal problems for hypergraph expansions). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.