CMSA E-Newsletter 9

COMBINATORIAL MATHEMATICS SOCIETY OF AUSTRALASIA (INC)

CMSA E-Newsletter Number 9 (June 2002)

INTRODUCTION:

Many thanks to the members who have sent information for this newsletter. But we can always do with more. 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 10: 30 September 2002.

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

A useful combinatorial site is the British Combinatorial Committee's web page: http://www.maths.qmw.ac.uk/~pjc/bcc/bcc.html (Conference listings in combinatorics are also available from that page.)

CONTENTS:

   * AIMS of the newsletter
   * NEWS FROM THE CMSA PRESIDENT
   * FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS

• 28th Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications University of Melbourne, 1-5 JULY 2002.
• ACISP'02 7th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, 3-5 JULY 2002.
• AWOCA 2002 Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms, 6-10 JULY 2002.
• 14th International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics 2002 Melbourne University, 8-12 JULY 2002.
• SIAM Conference on Discrete Mathematics, 11-14 AUGUST 2002.
• EWM International Workshop on Groups and Graphs Varna, Bulgaria, 31 AUG-6 SEPT 2002.
• XVIth Midwestern CCCC XVIth Midwestern Conference on Combinatorics, Computing and Cryptography, 7-9 NOV 2002.
• 27ACCMCC University of Newcastle, 9-13 DEC 2002.
• NZMRI Summer Workshop, New Plymouth, New Zealand, 4-11 JAN 2003.
• Permutation Patterns - 2003 University of Otago, New Zealand, 10-14 FEB 2003.
• Graph Theory of Brian Alspach Simon Fraser University, 25-29 MAY 2003.

   * RECENT NEWS OF CMSA MEMBERS and VISITORS

• Kevin McAvaney with news from Oman
• Andrei Kelarev with news about his daughter in the Australian IMO team
• Visitors to UQ

   * AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS

AIMS of the newsletter:

   * to promote combinatorics within Australasia
   * to provide a forum for sharing combinatorial and related information
   * to keep CMSA Members informed and in touch with combinatorial and related matters

NEWS from the CMSA PRESIDENT

This year is quite a busy one for the combinatorics conferencer. For instance, in Melbourne we will have two international conferences in July, the first on Stochastic Processes and their applications (the scope includes discrete random processes) which will be immediately followed by FPSAC. Simultaneous with the Stochastic Processes is ACISP, on Information Security, also in Melbourne, and simultaneous with FPSAC is the AWOCA meeting at Fraser Island. These conferences and more are mentioned in the conference section of this newsletter.

Professor Brendan McKay deserves congratulations for obtaining one of the 23 ARC Professorial Fellowships awarded in 2002. Probably not all members are aware that this is the first year of a new scheme, a little different from the earlier "Senior Research Fellows".

Sadly, Professor Bill Tutte passed away earlier this month. His eminence in the field, including his achievements in code-breaking of the Lorenz cipher in World War II, would be hard to surpass. His interest in combinatorics and in continued contact with his combinatorial colleagues remained with him until the end. I heard that it was for this reason that he moved back, a year or two ago, to Waterloo from the UK. Only last October, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada. An obituary is at http://www.cms.math.ca/bulletins/obit.html and there are a few nice web pages on the Lorenz cipher at http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/fish.htm .

It is regrettable that Professor Herb Shank also passed away recently. Herb worked on graph theory, embeddings and polynomials. Herb spent a good deal of time at Waterloo, though probably not as much as Bill Tutte. Anne Street pointed out to me that both Bill and Herb were invited speakers at the first combinatorics conference in Brisbane (the third Australian conference, in 1974). Bill talked about the graph of the chromatic polynomial of a graph, and Herb talked about left-right paths in a plane graph. Anne also recalls that Bill's presence was assisted by an eclipse of the sun, not visible from the Northern Hemisphere, making it possible to snare him as he went by to observe it.

Nick Wormald nick@ms.unimelb.edu.au

FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS:

28th Conference on STOCHASTIC PROCESSES AND THEIR APPLICATIONS

This will be held at the University of Melbourne, Parkville, from 1-5 July 2002.

Please see the web page http://www.spa28.ms.unimelb.edu.au/.

ACISP'02

The 7th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ACISP'02) will be held in Melbourne from July 3 to 5 at Rydges Riverwalk Hotel. In conjunction with the conference, there is an afternoon workshop on computer forensics on July 2 at Deakin's Toorak campus. Details can be found on http://www.cm.deakin.edu.au/ACISP'02. The submission deadline for ACISP papers, published by Springer, was February 18, 2002.

Lynn Batten, Deakin University

AWOCA 2002 The Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms will be hosted by the University of Queensland, with the venue being Kingfisher Bay Resort, Fraser Island, Queensland, from 7-10 JULY 2002.

Enjoy the tranquil beauty of Fraser Island while attending stimulating seminars on combinatorics and combinatorial algorithms.

Check out the venue at http://www.kingfisherbay.com/.

The program involves six internationally renowned invited speakers. They are:

   * Edy Tri Baskoro, ITB, Indonesia: Ramsey numbers.
   * Franya Franek, MacMaster University, Canada: Computing quasi suffixes.
   * Heather Gavlas, University of Vermont, USA: Topic to be announced.
   * Curt Lindner, Auburn University, USA: The history of the embeddings of partial 4-cycle systems.
   * Kunsoo Park, Seoul National University, Korea: Parallel algorithms for dictionary searches on binary trees.
   * Chris Rodger, Auburn University, USA: Edge-colourings and graph decompositions.

Other talks will be presented by participants from Korea, China, Spain, USA, France, Indonesia, The Netherlands, Canada, Greece and of course Australia.

Abstract for contributed talks will be accepted up until 20th of June.

Check out all the details on the website http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~njc/awoca/awoca2002.

Contacts: Diane Donovan dmd@maths.uq.edu.au Abdollah Khodkar ak@maths.uq.edu.au

The 14th International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics 2002 will be held from 8-12 July 2002 at the University of Melbourne.

Please see the web site http://www.fpsac.ms.unimelb.edu.au/.

SIAM Conference on Discrete Mathematics The SIAM Conference on Discrete Mathematics is from August 11-14, 2002. Deadlines for minisymposium proposals and contributed abstracts have now passed (April 2002), but please join us in sunny San Diego for this exciting biennual event. This year's invited speakers include:

   * George Andrews, Penn State University
   * Ralph Faudree, University of Memphis
   * Monika Henzinger, Google
   * Pavel Pevzner, University of California, San Diego
   * Cheryl Praeger, University of Western Australia
   * John Stembridge, University of Michigan
   * David Williamson, IBM Almaden

For more information on participating in the conference and attending, please visit: http://www.siam.org/meetings/dm02/

Frank Ruskey fruskey@csr.uvic.ca

[On behalf of the organizing committee: Fan Chung, Chris Godsil, Jerry Griggs, Laci Lovasz, Brendan McKay, Jeffrey Remmel, Christophe Reutenauer, Frank Ruskey (Chair), Carla Savage, Douglas Stinson, Doug West.]

EWM International Workshop on Groups and Graphs The EWM (European Women in Mathematics) organises general meetings each odd year and specialised workshops each even year. Their aim is to bring together young researchers and women-experts in some fields of mathematics, give them the opportunity to present their results, and the methods and techniques they use, and thus encourage young women to remain in Mathematics.

All the invited speakers will be women, but otherwise the workshop is open to everybody who works, or has any interest in, GROUPS and GRAPHS.

The Workshop will be held in Bulgaria on the coast of the Black Sea from August 31 to September 6, 2002. Early registration closes 30 June 2002. For further information please see the web page at http://www.moi.math.bas.bg/EWM02/

The XVIth Midwestern CCCC The XVIth Midwestern Conference on Combinatorics, Computing and Cryptography will take place at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, starting at 9 am on Thursday November 7th and concluding in mid-afternoon of Saturday November 9th.

A list of invited speakers and further conference details will be announced late in July.

Contributed talks are welcome in any area of combinatorial mathematica or combinatorial computing. Talks will be of 20 minutes duration, including discussion time.

Email enquiries: Wal Wallis wdwallis@math.siu.edu

The 27th ACCMCC The 27th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing (27ACCMCC) will be held at Newcastle University, NSW, from 9-13 DECEMBER 2002. The invited speakers are:

   * Dragos Cvetkovic   (University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia),   graph theory and combinatorics
   * Jerrold Griggs   (University of South Carolina, U.S.A.),   extremal set theory and extremal graph theory
   * Mirka Miller   (University of Newcastle, NSW),   graph theory
   * Ron Mullin   (University of Waterloo, Canada),   combinatorial designs and network security
   * Alex Rosa   (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada),   combinatorial designs
   * Jozef Siran   (Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia),   topological graph theory
   * Ralph Stanton   (University of Manitoba, Canada),   combinatorial designs and graph theory

The 27ACCMCC has been advertised on http://www.ams.org/mathcal/ http://at.yorku.ca/amca/index.htm and http://www.netlib.org/confdb/Conferences.html.

The 27ACCMCC web page is http://www.cs.newcastle.edu.au/~accmcc/.

Abstracts can now be submitted online through the web site. The closing date for these 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

New Zealand MRI Summer Workshop

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. As usual, families are invited to come. We especially encourage New Zealand graduate and senior students, and ask that most of the talks be directed at a graduate student level. The standard format is that we have lectures in the morning, the afternoons are left free for individual pursuits, families, sightseeing, mathematical discussions, and the like, and we have lectures in the early evening after dinner. There will also be one day off (traditionally Wednesday).

We have a stellar group of speakers, all of whom are world renowned mathematicians and computer scientists, and very fine speakers. We have asked that the speakers give a series of 2-3 lectures for this workshop, the first two being easily accessibly to graduate students.

Our speakers currently include (in no particular order):

   * Karl Broman (Johns Hopkins University, Recombination Mapping)
   * Mike Hallett (Magill University, Parametric Aspects of Computational Biology)
   * Neil Robertson (Ohio State University, The Graph Minors Project)
   * Martin Grohe (University of Edinburgh, Logical Aspects of Graphs)
   * Andreas Dress (University of Bielefeld, Overview of Combinatorial Biology)
   * Tandy Warnow (University of Texas, Mathematical Aspects of Phylogeny)
   * Lior Pachter (University of California, Berkeley, Genefinding)
   * Terry Speed (University of California, Berkeley, Mathematical Aspects of Gene Expression)
   * Richard Stanley (MIT, Enumerative Combinatorics).

It is primarily being organized by Geoff Whittle Geoff.Whittle@mcs.vuw.ac.nz and Rod Downey rod.downey@vuw.ac.nz of Victoria University, who will be happy to answer any questions.

This should be a wonderful workshop. As usual, we will cover most local costs for NZ residents. This year we will make sure that the meeting does not get too big. We will soon be putting out an announcement asking for numbers. If you wish to be on such a list, please e-mail Geoff Whittle: Geoff.Whittle@mcs.vuw.ac.nz.

Permutation Patterns - 2003

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.

Graph Theory of Brian Alspach

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 of 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.

A very useful website giving upcoming conferences in Coding, Cryptography and Effective Algebra AND their deadlines is http://www-rocq.inria.fr/codes/Anne.Canteaut/annonces.html .

RECENT NEWS OF CMSA MEMBERS and others:

News from Kevin McAvaney in Oman:

Kevin McAvaney at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman visited the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Kuwait University from 11 - 15 May 2002 to work with Peter Horak on some graph theory. While there he gave a department seminar on the problem of fair division, and a combinatorics seminar on homogeneous graphs.

Andrei Kelarev from Tasmania, has some good news about his daughter Elena (grade 12). Congratulations to Elena!

The team to represent Australia at the International Mathematical Olympiad, at Glasgow, UK, from 19 to 30 July, is (all grade 12s):

   * CHAN David,     Sydney Grammar School     NSW
   * KWOK Andrew,     University High School     Vic
   * SHERIDAN Nicholas,    Scotch College     Vic
   * WHITE Gareth,     Hurlstone Agricultural High School    NSW
   * WILCOX Stewart,     North Sydney Boys High School     NSW
   * ZHAO Yiying,     Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School     Vic

Reserve

   * KELAREVA Elena,     Elizabeth College     Tas

Team Leader will be Dr Angelo di Pasquale, and Deputy Leader Mr Daniel Mathews (both from the University of Melbourne). " See the web page http://www.amt.canberra.edu.au/olteams2002.html.

News of visitors to Queensland:

  1. Barbara Maenhaut (Open University, UK) is visiting UQ from May 13 until June 21 2002.
  2. Heather Gavlas (University of Vermont, USA) is visiting UQ from 27 June until 23 July 2002.
  3. Roger Eggleton (Illinois State University, USA) is visiting UQ from 1-6 July 2002.
  4. Curt Lindner (Auburn University, USA) is visiting UQ from 2-19 July 2002.
  5. Chris Rodger (Auburn University, USA) is visiting UQ in early July.
  6. Alan Offer (off soon to Ghent, Belgium) is visiting UQ during the week ending 21 June.

The AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS :

There is now a web page for the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics, and it has a search facility for past authors and for keywords in paper titles. See http://ajc.math.auckland.ac.nz/ . Instructions to authors are also available from this web site.

Volume 26 goes to the printers soon and will appear in September 2002. The contents of volumes are listed at the above web page; Volume 26 will be listed shortly.

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.

REMINDER: Deadline for next issue 30 September, 2002. Elizabeth Billington, Dept Maths, University of Queensland, Qld 4072. Fax: +61 7 3365 1477 ejb@maths.uq.edu.au