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 12: 30 May 2003.
CMSA WEB PAGE: http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/CMSA/
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:
Bernhard H. Neumann, 15 October 1909 - 21 October 2002
The following, written by Sheila Williams on behalf of the CMSA, is to appear in Volume 27 of the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics (March 2003).
We were saddened to hear of the death of Emeritus Professor Bernhard H. Neumann, AC. Many people and organisations will be paying tribute to Bernhard, and there will be a full obituary in the Australian Mathematical Society's Gazette in Volume 30 Number 1, March 2003, so we will restrict ourselves to acknowledging the support that Bernhard gave to combinatorics in Australia. As well as accepting the position of Honorary Editor when the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics began publication in 1990, he attended many of the Australasian Conferences on Combinatorial Mathematics, and the International Conference held in Canberra in 1977. He was a member of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia from its inception and continued as a member despite his obvious disappointment that there seemed to be insurmountable obstacles to his desire for closer links between the CMSA and the Australian Mathematical Society.
Although most people are aware of Bernhard's numerous profound contributions as a group theorist, his interests ranged far wider than that, and some of his papers, such as `Matrizenkalkul in der Booleschen Algebra,' `Some sequences like Fibonacci's' and several about polygons, could well be classified as combinatorics. So we combinatorialists have good reason to think of Bernhard as one of us, and, with the rest of the mathematical world, to greatly mourn his passing.
My new address for official matters is:
Professor N. C. Wormald
Canada Research Chair in Combinatorics and Optimization
Department of Combinatorics and Optimization
University of Waterloo
Waterloo ON
Canada N2L 3G1
email: nwormald@uwaterloo.ca
phone: (+1) 519 885 1211 ext 6983
Having completed most of the chores associated with my recent move to Waterloo, I am reminded of one thing in particular: the breadth of combinatorics and its closely allied areas. This comes both from considering the C&O Department here (graph theory, enumeration, optimization, designs, cryptography, O.R., quantum computing) and also the plans that Lynn Batten has been making for the next ACCMCC in December 2003 (which also include geometry and other areas of application of combinatorics). Watch the conference web page http://www.cm.deakin.edu.au/comb2003melbourne for invited speakers, and make your plans for attending!
Nick Wormald
CMSA President
Congratulations to Nick on his prestigious Research Chair in Canada! See http://www.chairs.gc.ca/english/about/factsheet/index.html and links from there about these Reasearch Chairs.
RECENT CONFERENCE REPORTS
27ACCMCC
9-13 December, 2002
27th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial
Computing (27ACCMCC) was held at The University of Newcastle, during December
9-13, 2002. The weekend before the conference started was marked by big
bushfires that completely stopped the traffic between Sydney and Newcastle
and for a while it was not quite clear whether conference participants
would
be able to arrive in Newcastle in time. A rainstorm on Wednesday surely
helped fight the fire but at the same time made a planned conference excursion
to Nelson Bay impossible.
The conference attracted 73 participants from 12 different countries.
There were 8 invited and 51 contributed talks, all of excellent quality.
The invited speakers were:
During the conference three meetings were held: Annual General Meeting
of ICA, Annual General Meeting of CMSA, and Council Meeting of CMSA.
A panel of three judges
(Brendan McKay, Anne Street and
Kevin McAvaney)
had a very hard time deciding which of the talks presented by students
was the best. The panel finally decided to have the
CMSA Student Prize
shared between
Peter Jenkins
from the University of Queensland and
Julie Cain
from the University of Melbourne.
Ljiljana Brankovic
FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
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.
Graphs with least eigenvalue greater than -2
Relational visualization
Database security and concentrating sums of vectors
Moore graphs and beyond
Natural involutions on F2[x] with connections
to factorization and enumeration
k-factorizations of complete graphs
Perfect bicoverings with maximal block length four
Counting connected graphs inside-out
lbrankov@cs.newcastle.edu.au
Permutation Patterns - 2003
Brian Alspach, one of the most influential graph theorists of the past four decades, will be 65 years old on May 29, 2003. This conference is to honour Brian's contribution to Mathematics and to celebrate his 65th Birthday. The conference is sponsored by the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) and Simon Fraser University.
There are 21 invited speakers and many more are expected to present the latest on Graph Theory. A special issue of Discrete Mathematics will be devoted to talks presented in this conference, subject to the strict refereeing process required by Discrete Mathematics.
Online registration and abstract submission (April 15 deadline) is available on the web page 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.
Faliraki, Rodos, Greece 1-7 JUNE 2003.
See the web site 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.
See the web site at
http://www.math.uoa.gr/~designs/down.htm for details.
Organisers are:
Combinatorics, Linear Algebra & Graph Coloring,
August 9-14, 2003.
This is being held at the
Institute for studies in theoretical Physics and Mathematics,
IPM, Tehran, Iran.
Invited speakers include:
Hadi Kharaghani
kharaghani@uleth.ca
CLAGC-2003, Tehran, Iran.
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.
The 28th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial
Computing will be held from 15-19 December 2003, at Deakin University, Burwood campus,
Melbourne.
Principal organizer:
Lynn Batten
lmbatten@deakin.edu.au
Program Committee: Lynn Batten, Elizabeth Billington, Peter Gibbons,
David Glynn, Tim Pentilla, Cheryl Praeger, Nick Wormald.
Invited speakers include the following (and more are planned):
For updates and more information, visit the website:
http://www.cm.deakin.edu.au/comb2003melbourne
A very useful website giving upcoming conferences in Coding,
Cryptography and Effective Algebra AND their deadlines is
RECENT NEWS OF CMSA
MEMBERS and others:
News from Nick Cavenagh
Nick Cavenagh
(njc@maths.uq.edu.au)
has accepted a 9-month Postdoctoral Fellowship with the
DIMATIA research group at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, which
he will commence in April 2003. His research project will be on latin
trades and critical sets in latin squares.
He will be looking for
research/lecturing work in combinatorics for 2004.
Diane Donovan
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
CLAGC-2003, Tehran, Iran
Please see the web site at
http://www.ipm.ac.ir/combinatorics
for details.
LOOPS 2003
28ACCMCC
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/codes/Anne.Canteaut/annonces.html .
is to be congratulated on her recent promotion to Associate
Professor at the University of Queensland. Well done Diane!
Ian Roberts
sends news from the Northern Territory University in Darwin.
Probably the only worthwhile bit of news is that Jeanette McLeod is on the way to ANU to begin a PhD with Brendan McKay. Last year Jeanette received a Chancellor's Medal from NTU for her honours, and also an Award for Mathematical Excellence from the NT Mathematics Teachers Association (MTANT).
Congratulations to Jeanette!
Nick Hamilton
is back at the University of Queensland! He writes:
I am now employed within The Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Environment which is part of the Advanced Computational Modelling Centre located in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Queensland. I'm part of a project doing modelling and visualisation of protein motors. You might even mention that I'm enjoying it very much as it seems that a lot of the things I used to do when I was avoiding work, like messing around with graphics and visualisation software, are now part of my job!
Nick Hamilton's email address is now nick@maths.uq.edu.au
Other snippets of news!
Ian Wanless has moved back to ANU from Oxford, to a postdoc with Brendan McKay.
Barbara Maenhaut takes up a 2 year position at the University of Queensland soon, working with Darryn Bryant and Peter Adams.
Andrew Blinco, who is about to submit his PhD thesis at the University of Queensland, will be teaching at a University in China for 8 weeks this semester.
Check the ALGEBRA 5 year lectureship
available at the University of Queensland.
(Go to
http://www.uq.edu.au/staff/vacancies/index.html
and click on Jobs@UQ.)
Closing date is 7 FEB!
The AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS :
The Council of the CMSA are delighted to announce that Anne Penfold Street has accepted our offer of an Honorary Editorship of the Journal.
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.
Instructions to authors are also available from this web site.
The contents of all volumes, 1 to 27, are listed at the above web page.
Volume 27 will appear in March 2003; it is currently being printed. Copies are being sent to all full registrants from the 26ACCMCC, which was held at Curtin in Perth in 2001.
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.
If anyone is interested in taking over the CMSA E-Newsletters,
please send expressions of interest to both the President,
Professor Nick Wormald at
nwormald@math.uwaterloo.ca
and to me. I have looked after this Newsletter since its inception
in 1999, but now since I'm both Editor-in-Chief of the Australasian Journal of
Combinatorics and Honorary Secretary of the Australian Mathematical Society,
I wish to step down as Newsletter Editor in the near future.
Liz
ejb@maths.uq.edu.au