CMSA E-Newsletter 12

COMBINATORIAL MATHEMATICS SOCIETY OF AUSTRALASIA (INC) E-Newsletter 12 (June 2003) 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 no newsletter is imminent! Please email the Newsletter Editor at p.manyem@ballarat.edu.au.

CLOSING DATE for Issue 13: September 30, 2003.

CMSA WEB PAGE: http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~db/CMSA/cmsa.html

NEWSLETTER WEB VERSIONS: http://uob-community.ballarat.edu.au/~pmanyem/cmsa/

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/~ejb/history.html

CONTENTS:

   * AIMS of the newsletter
   * NEWS from Nick Wormald, the CMSA PRESIDENT
   * RECENT CONFERENCE REPORTS

Conference on Permutation Patterns University of Otago, NZ, FEBRUARY 10-14, 2003

   * FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS

3rd Pythagorean Conf on Geometry, Combinatorial Designs, Cryptology & Related Structures Faliraki, Rodos, Greece, JUNE 1-7, 2003.
USP Conference, University of the South Pacific, MAY 31 - JUNE 8, 2003.
British Combinatorial Conference Bangor, Wales, JUNE 29 - JULY 4, 2003.
ICIAM International Congress on Indistrial & Applied Mathematics, Sydney, JULY 7-11, 2003.
International Conf on Recent Advances in Statistical Designs and Related Combinatorics National Technical University of Athens JULY 7-9, 2003.
AWOCA (Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms), Seoul, South Korea, JULY 13-16, 2003.
Combinatorics, Linear Algebra & Graph Coloring IPM, Tehran, Iran AUGUST 9-14, 2003.
LOOPS Charles University and the Czech University of Agriculture AUGUST 10-17, 2003.
Workshop on Incidence Geometry University of Adelaide, DECEMBER 9-12, 2003
28ACCMCC Deakin University, Burwood campus, Melbourne DECEMBER 15-19, 2003.

   * RECENT NEWS OF CMSA MEMBERS and VISITORS

Roger Eggleton and Wal Wallis visit the University of Newcastle during JUNE-JULY 2003.
Jonathan Jedwab about to join Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada

   * 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 PRESIDENT

This issue of the newsletter marks the changeover in editorship from the capable hands of Liz Billington to the equally capable (judging by what I have seen at the time of writing this) hands of Prabhu Manyem. We are all grateful to Liz for her efforts on the electronic newsletter since its inception in October 1999. Prabhu's offer to take over the baton has been welcomed by all. Thanks to both of you from all members.

My recent move to Canada drew a few queries about how I am finding the system in Canada compared to Australia, where I moved from. For many aspects of academic life, I have not been here long enough to comment. But certainly the greater research funding in Canada is noticeable. For example, NSERC discovery grants have upwards of 80% success rate overall -- of course, ARC (Australia) struggles to fund 25%. NSERC grants are typically a bit smaller than ARC's, but nonetheless seem to be effective.

Workshop funding is abundant in Canada. This has been largely lacking in Australia, but the recently established Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, and the more recent ARC Centre of Excellence in the Mathematical and Statistical Modelling of Complex Systems, will hopefully make a difference. According to the Centre's director Tony Guttmann, the Centre will work with AMSI on the conference/workshop educational and industrial front. One of our members, Lynn Batten, wrote an interesting personal account of the Canadian Mathematical Sciences Institutes in the AMS Gazette, Vol. 31 (no. 1), appearing in March this year. I have not heard lately from our New Zealand constituents on how this aspect of life is in the land of the long white cloud. In general, I would be interested to hear from any of our members outside Australia (and anyone in Australia who wants to bend my ear), on how they perceive research funding -- the status quo and if it is changing.

The minutes of Council meetings (accessible from the CMSA web page) will give members a chance to see some of the activities of the CMSA Council. However, you might benefit from hearing a little of what else occupies us ... many discussions take place outside the meetings.

Lately we have been struggling with the rules that go along with the incorporation of CMSA as a society under the Queensland (Australia) parliamentary Act. The rules of that Act make it difficult for us to hold AGM's at conferences in July some years and December other years. However, there are solutions and we seem to have settled on a course of action, which you will no doubt hear about at an appropriate time.

Another item of current debate is the design of certificates for life members and student prize winners. Watch out for the final results at this December's ACCMCC in Melbourne.

Nick Wormald CMSA President

RECENT CONFERENCE REPORTS First International Conference on Permutation Patterns February 10-14, 2003

Permutation patterns is a research area within combinatorics that has grown by leaps and bounds in the last 10 years. Two sequences are said to have the same pattern if the relative order of their terms is the same. So, for example, 213 and 528 have the same pattern. A permutation is said to avoid a pattern if no subsequence of it has that pattern. Then a typical enumerative problem in the field is: how many permutations of length n are there which avoid the pattern 1324? The topic of permutation patterns has applications in computer science, algebraic geometry, and two-dimensional data analysis, and provides a feast of combinatorial problems of various kinds.

This conference, the first to be devoted solely to this topic, took place February 10-14, 2003 at the University of Otago. It was attended by 24 delegates, 17 of whom were from overseas (7 from the USA, 2 from Canada, 3 from Israel, 2 from Sweden, 1 from Finland, 1 from the UK, 1 from Spain). It was generously supported by the NZIMA with a grant that enabled some younger researchers to attend. The key note speaker was Herbert Wilf, one of the founders of the subject. The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics is publishing a special issue to mark the conference, and extended abstracts are also available as a technical report at http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/trseries.

The conference was so enjoyed by the participants that plans are underway for a second one in July 2004 at the University of Victoria (Canada) following FPSAC -- and a third in April 2005 at the University of Florida. Participants from overseas were keen to repeat the New Zealand experience, and we hope that the fourth conference will once again take place at Otago in 2006 -- some care will be needed to reproduce the glorious weather we had!

Regards,

Michael Albert and Mike Atkinson

FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS: Third Pythagorean Conference on Geometry, Combinatorial Designs, Cryptology and Related Structures Faliraki, Rodos, Greece, JUNE 1-7 2003.

See the web site at http://zeus.math.fau.edu/pythag3/

Invited Speakers include:

   * Aart Blokhuis
   * Charlie Colbourn
   * Gerhard Frey
   * Klaus Metsch
   * Doug Stinson

USP 2003 Conference University of the South Pacific, MAY 31 - JUNE 8, 2003.

See http://www.usp.ac.fj/~vanualailai/conference/ for details of the

USP 2003 conference on Applied Algebra, Cryptography and Information Technology at the University of the South Pacific from May 31 to June 8.

British Combinatorial Conference Bangor, Wales, JUNE 29 - JULY 4, 2003.

See the web site http://www.informatics.bangor.ac.uk/public/math/bcc2003/index.html for details.

Invited speakers include:

   * Lars Andersen, Aalborg University, Denmark
   * Simon Blackburn, Royal Holloway, UK
   * Alexandre Borovik, UMIST, UK
   * Pavol Hell, Simon Fraser University, Canada
   * Dieter Jungnickel, University of Augsburg, Germany
   * Imre Leader, DPMMS, Cambridge, UK
   * Arun Ram, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
   * Anne Street, Queensland, Australia
   * Gunter M. Ziegler, Institute of Mathematics, Technical University of Berlin, Germany

ICIAM 2003 International Congress on Indistrial & Applied Matehmatics, Sydney, JULY 7-11, 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 web page for this embedded meeting (which you can find through the ICIAM site) is http://www.austms.org.au/People/Conf/ANZ03/ .

Pre-registration is now closed. For on-site (late) registration details, see the ICIAM webpage.

International Conference on Recent Advances in Statistical Designs and Related Combinatorics National Technical University of Athens, JULY 7-9, 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:

   * Ch A Charalambides (Univ of Athens)
   * C Koukouvinos (National Tech Univ of Athens)
   * C Moyssiadis (Univ of Thessaloniki)
   * T Papaioannou (Univ of Piraeus)
   * J Seberry (Univ of Wollongong)

AWOCA 2003, Seoul, South Korea The 14th Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms, July 13-16, 2003.

This is being held at the Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea.

Topics include:

   * Algorithms and Data Structures
   * Complexity Theory
   * Graph Theory and Combinatorics
   * Cryptography
   * Algorithms on Strings
   * Graph Algorithms
   * Graph Drawing
   * Computational Algebra and Geometry
   * Computational Biology
   * Communications Networks
   * Probabilistic and Randomized Algorithms
   * New Paradigms of Computation

Please see the webpage at http://theory.snu.ac.kr/awoca2003/ for details.

Kunsoo Park (Chairman, Organising Committee): awoca2003@theory.snu.ac.kr

CLAGC-2003, Tehran, Iran 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:

   * Richard Brualdi
   * Peter Cameron
   * Zoltan Furedi
   * Charles Johnson
   * Carsten Thomassen
   * Richard Wilson

Please see the web site at http://www.ipm.ac.ir/combinatorics for details.

Hadi Kharaghani kharaghani@uleth.ca CLAGC-2003, Tehran, Iran.

LOOPS 2003 Charles University and the Czech University of Agriculture, : AUGUST 10-17, 2003.

See the web site at http://adela.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~loops03/ for details.

28ACCMCC The 28th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing will be held from December 15-19, 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):

   * Peter Adams, The University of Queensland (bio-algorithms and applications)
   * Laura Bader, University of Rome (combinatorial geometry)
   * Hendrik Van Maldeghem, University of Gent (buildings)
   * Ian Wanless, Australian National University (Latin squares)

For updates and more information, visit the website: http://www.cm.deakin.edu.au/comb2003melbourne

Workshop on Incidence Geometry The Institute for Geometry and its Applications at the University of Adelaide is hosting a Workshop on Incidence Geometry at Adelaide, South Australia, during December 9-12, 2003. Speakers so far include:

   * Hendrik Van Maldeghem (Ghent),
   * Tim Penttila (Western Australia) and
   * Jef Thas (Ghent).

For more details, visit the website http://www.maths.adelaide.edu.au/iga/wig.html or email the organisers:

   * Sue Barwick:  sbarwick@maths.adelaide.edu.au, or
   * Matthew Brown:  mbrown@maths.adelaide.edu.au

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 .

CMSA E-Newsletter 12

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