INTRODUCTION:
Thank you to the members who have sent information for this newsletter.
Please send news as soon as you have anything
of possible interest to CMSA Members and the Combinatorial Community,
even if there is no newsletter imminent!
Please email the Newsletter Editor on
ejb@maths.uq.edu.au.
CLOSING DATE for Issue 11: 31 January 2003.
CMSA WEB PAGE: http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~db/CMSA/cmsa.html
NEWSLETTER WEB VERSIONS: (complete list) http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~ejb/cmsa-newsletters.html
CMSA CONFERENCE HISTORY PAGE (all past conferences organised under the CMSA; thanks to Kevin McAvaney for starting this page) http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/cdmc/history.html
CONTENTS:
New Zealand already has its Mathematical Research Institute http://www.nzima.auckland.ac.nz/NZMRI.html and Institute of Mathematics & its Applications http://www.nzima.auckland.ac.nz/
Perhaps the most mathematically significant thing happening in Australia recently is the establishment of its own Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, AMSI. See http://www.amsi.org.au/ for details (but this is so new, you won't find too much there).
One thing which is firmly planned right now by AMSI is a set of summer courses for honours and postgraduate students.
Another is the call for expressions of interest for symposia/workshops for the year 2003.
Approximately in the words of the Interim Director, Tony Guttmann, this Institute has a more ambitious scope than its overseas counterparts, with (down to) a fifth or tenth of the funding ... not sure if he is referring to the NZ institute here. Our Canadian members probably get the idea quite accurately though.
Let me close by hoping that as many of you as possible can make it to Newcastle in December for the 27 ACCMCC.
Nick Wormald
CMSA President
RECENT CONFERENCE REPORTS
AWOCA 2002
Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms,
6-10 JULY 2002.
The Thirteenth Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms (AWOCA)
was held on Fraser Island, Queensland,
from 7th to 10th July in the very peaceful
surrounds of Kingfisher Bay Resort.
Participants enjoyed lavish lunches, picturesque sunsets, an excursion to
the exquisite white
sand, pure freshwater lakes, and some karaoke at the conference dinner.
The only
unfortunate event (apart from some of the karaoke acts) was a collision
between a cow and a University of
Queensland vehicle on the return trip to
Brisbane. Thankfully the cow was the only fatality; the only injured
person was driver Peter Adams who spent the night in Gympie hospital
and suffered a badly mangled broken toe.
But we were all extremely grateful Peter had
ensured that we were wearing seatbelts.
The invited speakers were:
A special thank-you to the School of Physical Sciences at
the University of Queensland, the EPSA Faculty at UQ,
and the ICA for their sponsorship, and a very special
thank-you to
Diane Donovan
who was the chief organiser.
Photos from the conference are available from the website:
www.maths.uq.edu.au/~njc/awoca/awoca2002
DISCRETE MATHEMATICS SESSION
within the
46th AustMS Meeting, Newcastle,
30 SEPT - 3 OCT 2002.
Ten talks were presented in the Special Session on Discrete Mathematics at the
recent Australian Mathematical Society's Annual Meeting in Newcastle.
These were presented by:
At the conference dinner the following was circulated on some tables:
Each nephew counts out his share in secret. Then Cecil says to Bob:
"Did you get a perfect square?"
Bob does not answer truthfully.
(You are not told whether his answer was "yes" or "no".)
Cecil believes Bob, and on the basis of Bob's answer concludes that
Bob got the most. Abraham, sitting by, smiles to himself because he
has deduced that Bob lied. How many pieces did each nephew get?
(There is a solution, and only one solution. There is enough information
to solve the problem. There are no tricks. No mathematical ability is
called for beyond knowledge of which numbers are perfect squares.
A solution depends on logical thinking and some psychological insight.)
FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Deadline for contributed talks is 7 OCTOBER!
A brief history of the embedding of partial 4-cycle systems
Parallel Algorithms for Dictionary Operations on Balanced Search Trees
Edge-colorings, hamilton cycles and graph decompositions
Hamiltonian Paths in Cartesian Powers of Directed Cycles
On the graph Ramsey Numbers R(G,Wm)
Computing quasi suffix arrays
[Scroll up a bit if you click on "Photos" at that site! Ed.]
Nick Cavenagh
Uncle Ebenezer is dying. He has exactly 500 gold pieces,
all of which he distributes amongst his four nephews, Abraham, Bob, Cecil
and Dwayne. Each nephew gets his share in a little bag.
They do not know what the others got, but they do know:
1.
That everybody got more tha 100 pieces.
2.
That Cecil and Dwayne got an equal number of pieces.
3.
Abe's and Bob's shares are different from Cecil and Dwayne.
4.
Abe's share is not the same as Bob's.
Victoria Algebra Days
Deakin University, Victoria, Australia,
28-29 OCT 2002.
This year, Victoria Algebra Days are being hosted by Deakin University on
Monday and Tuesday October 28 and 29, 2002.
The local organizing committee is:
Lynn Batten, John Carminati and Robert Coulter.
All information about the
conference can be found on its website:
http://www.cm.deakin.edu.au/VICALGEBRADAYS
Invited speakers include:
Twenty-minute contributed talks are invited. Abstracts are due by October 15, 2002.
See the web site at http://www.unlv.edu/Colleges/Sciences/Mathematics/16thMCCCC.html for further details.
The Organizing Committee:
W.D. Wallis (Mathematics, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale)
Nick Phillips (Computer Science, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale)
Michelle Schultz (Mathematical Sciences, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
The 27ACCMCC web page is
http://www.cs.newcastle.edu.au/~accmcc/.
Abstracts can now be submitted online through the web site, and a registration form is available there. The closing date for abstracts, and for early-bird registration, is 18 November 2002.
There is a Prize for the best Student Talk, awarded by the CMSA.
Any enquiries, please email either accmcc@cs.newcastle.edu.au or lbrankov@cs.newcastle.edu.au
Ljiljana Brankovic
This year the annual NZMRI summer workshop will be based in beautiful New Plymouth in the North Island of New Zealand. This follows previous workshops in Huia (1994), Tolaga Bay (1996, 1997), Napier (1998, 2002), Raglan (1999), Kaikoura (2000), and Nelson (2001).
The topic for New Plymouth (2003), will be Combinatorics and Combinatorial Aspects of Biology although this will be interpreted broadly.
See the web site at www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~mathmeet
Our speakers currently include (in no particular order):
Permutation Patterns - 2003 will be held at the University of Otago, New Zealand, 10 - 14 February 2003.
See http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/mike/PP2003/FirstAnnouncement.html for more information, and for a link to the Second Announcement also.
Brian Alspach is 65 next year and we are celebrating his birthday in a spectacular "Graph Theory of Brian Alspach" conference from May 25 to 29, 2003 on the beautiful campus of Simon Fraser University.
Visit the conference web site: http://www.cs.uleth.ca/gtba
If you wish to be put on our mailing list, please send e-mail to Hadi Kharaghani at hadi@cs.uleth.ca.
CONTRIBUTED TALKS:
There will be a number of 20 minute contributed talks. Abstracts for
contributed talks will be reviewed for conference presentation. There
will be a special issue of Discrete Mathematics devoted to papers from the
conference. The refereeing for all papers submitted for possible publication
in the special issue will be according to the high standards of Discrete
Mathematics. Abstracts for the papers can be submitted using an on-line
submission form available at the above web site.
Faliraki, Rodos, Greece 1-7 JUNE 2003.
See the web site (under construction) at http://zeus.math.fau.edu/pythag3/
Invited Speakers include:
Bangor, Wales,
29 JUNE - 4 JULY 2003.
See the web site
http://www.informatics.bangor.ac.uk/public/math/bcc2003/index.html
for details.
Invited speakers include:
International Congress on Indistrial & Applied Matehmatics,
Sydney,
7-11 JULY 2003.
Please see http://www.iciam.org
for all details about ICIAM 2003.
One of the embedded meetings will be the
Sixth Australia - New Zealand
Mathematics Convention, and there will be mini-symposia involving various
aspects of combinatorics.
The early bird registration is 29 November 2002.
National Technical University of Athens,
7-9 JULY 2002.
This is in honour of Stratis Kounias.
Organisers are:
Charles University and the Czech University of Agriculture,
10-17 AUGUST 2003.
See the web site at
http://adela.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~loops03/
for details.
A very useful website giving upcoming conferences in Coding,
Cryptography and Effective Algebra AND their deadlines is
RECENT NEWS OF CMSA
MEMBERS and others:
Peter Adams, Darryn Bryant and Jonathan Keith
(all from the Department of Mathematics at UQ) and Keith
Mitchelson (from the Australian Genome Research Facility at UQ)
have received a $250,000
grant from the Biotechnology Innovation Fund (BIF).
This is the maximum size for BIF grants,
and the money will be used to fund research, development and
commercialisation of a novel DNA sequencing technology. The spin-out company
Combinomics is being formed, to undertake the development. BIF is funded by the
Federal Government, and is a merit-based competitive grants program which aims to
increase the rate of commercialisation of Australian biotechnology discoveries.
It provides funding assistance to companies to demonstrate proof-of-concept
between the research and commercialisation stages.
News from Ian Roberts (Northern Territory University
when he's not travelling!), who writes:
I am currently on a long-deserved and long-needed sabbatical
(or PDL - professional development leave in NTU speak).
My itinery is roughly:
See you all at 27ACCMCC in Newcastle.
The trip has been good so far, with lots of new problems and ideas
and even some solutions. Round-the-world fares are a good way to go.
Jeanette McLeod is teaching
my first year class in discrete maths while I'm away and
Prabhu Manyem at the University of South Australia
is helping out with a third level subject from his place with
Jeanette as local tutor.
Richard Bean
I am working as a post-doctoral researcher in combinatorics at the
Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics
in Tehran, Iran. This position is a two year position.
I have done some more work on the largest size of critical
sets in Latin squares, and am learning about graph embedding
problems and chess related problems (the latter for fun).
Richard Bean was recently awarded his PhD from the University of Queensland,
with Diane Donovan as supervisor.
British Combinatorial Conference
ICIAM 2003
The web page for this embedded meeting (which you can find through the ICIAM site)
is
http://www.austms.org.au/People/Conf/ANZ03/ .
International Conference on Recent Advances in Statistical Designs and Related
Combinatorics
LOOPS 2003
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/codes/Anne.Canteaut/annonces.html .
San Diego State (David Carlson) 4-13/9,
University of Wisconsin (Sergei Bezrukov) 13-27/9,
MIGHTY - Mid West Graph Theory Conference at Illinois State
at Bloomington-Normal (Roger Eggleton),
Southern Illinois University 28-2/10 (Wal Wallis),
South Carolina (Jerry Griggs) till 22/10
with a quick trip to Clemson for a conference 10-11/10,
Reading (Tony Hilton) (UK) till 2/11,
Bielefeld, Rostock (Uwe Leck) and
Magdeburg in Germany 2-16/11,
then Nottingham (Neville Davies)(UK)
and home before the end of November.
Information from David Glynn:
Some visitors to QEC Project (Aotearoa)
Information from Rebecca Gower and job information at Linz
Rebecca Gower is working at a firm in Oxford, and she writes:
Don't know if this is of any interest to put in the CMSA newsletter.
It was sent to me but I don't really know academics and graduates looking
for jobs so perhaps the newsletter would reach those people?
Have just got back from a week's holiday in Ireland and I am just trying to
catch up with emails and what needs attention now.
The holiday was great - amazingly sunny and lovely for the time of year.
Subject: Job offer at the Algebra Group at Linz
The AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS
:
The web page for the Australasian Journal of
Combinatorics is at
http://ajc.math.auckland.ac.nz/ .
This has a
search facility
for past authors and
for keywords in the titles of papers.
Volume 26
appeared in September 2002.
The contents of all volumes, 1 to 26, are listed at the above web page.
Submissions to the AJC may be sent to
ajc@maths.uq.edu.au .
Electronic submissions are encouraged.
For paper submissions, please check the web page.
The Australasian Journal of Combinatorics is published by the Combinatorial
Mathematics Society of Australasia Inc.
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002
From: Erhard Aichinger
Organization: Division of Algebra, Univ. Linz
See the job offer at
http://www.uni-linz.ac.at/ausschreibungen/817.htm
Erhard Aichinger, Univ. Linz, Austria
Instructions to authors are also available from this web site.
REMINDER:
Deadline for next issue of this Newsletter: 31 January, 2003.
Elizabeth Billington, Dept Maths, University of Queensland, Qld 4072.
Fax: +61 7 3365 1477
ejb@maths.uq.edu.au