7th Lake Michigan Workshop on Combinatorics and Graph Theory

University Of Illinois At Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The 7th Lake Michigan Workshop on Combinatorics and Graph Theory will be held at the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at the University Illinois at Chicago (UIC) on April 4--5, 2020 (Saturday--Sunday). This annual workshop is targeted towards researchers in discrete mathematics at institutions in the area around Lake Michigan. This award will support travel expenses for workshop participants. The workshop will be centered around two series of three tutorial lectures each, focusing on state-of-the-art techniques in combinatorics. There will also be closely related short talks by students and early-career researchers. There will be ample unscheduled time during the workshop to allow new research collaborations to commence and active collaborations to be continued. The workshop will particularly benefit undergraduates, graduate students, and early-career researchers by introducing them to new research directions and helping them establish valuable connections with more senior colleagues. 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, probability theory, algorithms, and network science. The confirmed tutorial speakers, Wojciech Samotij (Tel Aviv University) and Cynthia Vinzant (North Carolina State University), will speak about some of their own recent breakthroughs in combinatorics. Samotij will speak about entropy methods in combinatorics and probabilistic combinatorics while Vinzant will speak about the log-concavity of polynomials and probabilistic and algorithmic applications. The two lecture series will cover a broad spectrum of combinatorics and graph theory ranging from extremal combinatorics to probabilistic combinatorics and algebraic combinatorics, but the two topics nevertheless share some common themes, notably fundamental properties of discrete probability distributions For more information please consult the workshop website: https://willp.people.uic.edu/lakemichigan2020/ . 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.