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Showing posts from April, 2020

Stanton Medal Winner Charlie Colbourn

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Dr Charlie Colbourn awarded the 2019 Stanton Medal of the ICA Stanton Medals  honour  significant lifetime contributions to promoting the discipline of combinatorics  through advocacy, outreach, service, teaching and/or mentoring. Dr Colbourn has been a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona since 2001.   Prior to that, from September, 1996, until August, 2001, he was the Dorothean Professor of Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont. From 1984-1996, he was a Professor of Combinatorics and Optimization and of Computer Science in the Faculty of Mathematics at University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.   He earned his PhD in 1980 from University of Toronto. Dr. Charles Colbourn has been a tireless lifelong cha

In Memoriam John Conway

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John Horton Conway FRS (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life. Game of Life is one of the early examples of a cellular automaton. His initial experiments in that field were done with pen and paper, long before personal computers existed. Since the game was introduced by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in 1970, it has spawned hundreds of computer programs, web sites, and articles. It is a staple of recreational mathematics. From the earliest days, it has been a favorite in computer labs, both for its theoretical interest and as a practical exercise in programming and data display. Conway used to hate the Game of Life — largely because it had come to overshadow some of the other deeper and more

Online colloquia series

In the time of social distancing, these colloquia/seminars are available digitally: weekly online combinatorics seminar aimed at graduate students and am excited to announce that the seminar is now official! Here is the website:  https://sites.google.com/view/gocc-combinatorics/ Talks will generally be 1:00-2:00 on Wednesday and all are welcome to attend (although first priority to present will be given to grad students and postdocs). If you'd like to join the GOCC googlegroup which will allow you to get emails and zoom links for future talks, please email  gocccombinatorics@gmail.com . That's also where you can let me know if you'd like to sign up to give a talk.  --------------------- I'd like to point your attention to this online listing of upcoming combinatorics talks from around the world, all taking place online via Zoom:    https://web.math.princeton.edu/~pds/onlinetalks/talks.html --------------------- Northeast Combinatorics Network Spring

Conference Postponement, 32nd Cumberland

Dear colleagues, In light of the current coronavirus situation, we have to cancel the 32nd Cumberland Conference on Combinatorics Graph Theory and Computing, which we had planned to hold at William & Mary in Williamsburg,  Virginia on  May 23-24, 2020. This is a very sad decision for us to make.  We were well-prepared to have a great conference here in Virginia.  Four outstanding scholars (Daniel Kral, Blair Sullivan, Douglas West, Yufei Zhao) had agreed to be our plenary speakers ( https://gyu.people.wm.edu/32Cumberland/32-cumberland.html 32nd Cumberland Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory, and Computing 32nd Cumberland Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory, and Computing: May 23-24, 2020 College of William & Mary Williamsburg, VA 23185 gyu.people.wm.edu ). Our college had provided generous support and we had also requested funding from NSF to support the travel of more junior researchers (Zi-Xia Song and Rong Luo were very kind to share with us

In Memoriam Robin Thomas

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Thomas received his doctorate in 1985 from Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), under the supervision of Jaroslav Nešetřil. He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1989, and became a Regents' Professor there, briefly serving as the department Chair. Thomas was awarded the Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in discrete mathematics twice, in 1994 as co-author of a paper on the Hadwiger conjecture, and in 2009 for the proof of the strong perfect graph theorem. In 2011 he was awarded the Karel Janeček Foundation Neuron Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He was named a SIAM Fellow in 2018.   In 2016 he received the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor for a professor at Georgia Tech.   On March 26, 2020, he lost his twelve-year struggle against Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Thomas_(mathematician