CMSA E-Newsletter 32

=Introduction= Thanks to all CMSA 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 (Eyal Loz) at: eyal at eyal.com.au

CLOSING DATE for Issue 33: September 15, 2010. (Please email items to the newsletter editor ONLY in plain text.)

Old newsletters can be found here.

=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.

=Future workshop and conference announcements=

SIGMAP'10, Oaxaca, Mexico
The workshop Symmetry in Graphs, Maps and Polytopes, SIGMAP'10, will be held in Oaxaca, Mexico, from June 20th to June 25th, 2010.

Oaxaca is a beautiful colonial city in the Mexican interior in close proximity to many interesting archaeological sites. It is famous for its colourful markets and interesting cuisine (boasting the best mezcal, Chocolate Street and the delicious chapulines). There is an international airport in Oaxaca. Alternatively, you could fly to Mexico City and take a six hour bus ride to Oaxaca. More information on travel to Oaxaca and the accommodation will be available on the conference website soon.

In 1998 the first SIGMAC workshop was organized by Steve Wilson in Flagstaff, Arizona. Since then, the workshops have been organized every four years, with workshops in 2002 and 2006 held in Aveiro, Portugal, organized by Antonio Breda d'Azevedo.

SIGMAP workshops are now part of the cycle of meetings that combinatorial geometers have every year, with 4 years periods, in New Zealand (in the years congruent to 0 mod 4), Slovakia (1 mod 4) and Slovenia (3 mod 4).

This workshop, the fourth in its series, will convene researchers interested in geometric, topological and combinatorial objects having large symmetry (automorphism) groups.

The program will consist of 50-minute talks by invited speakers, and 20 minute contributed talks, a problem session, an outing, a banquet and wealth of time for conversation. The contributions are to be related to one of the following topics:


 * Group actions on graphs
 * Regular maps and hypermaps
 * Highly symmetric polytopes
 * Symmetric higher-dimensional complexes
 * Automorphism groups of Riemann surfaces and algebraic curves

See you in Oaxaca!

Organizing committee

 * Javier Bracho
 * Antonio Breda d'Azevedo
 * Isabel Hubard
 * Asia Ivic Weiss
 * Steve Wilson

Contact
Url: http://www.matem.unam.mx/sigmap10/

Email: sigmap10 -at- matem.unam.mx

The ICRTGC-2010 Conference
International Conference on Recent Trends in Graph theory and Combinatorics, ICRTGC-2010 12-15, August 2010, Cochin, India.

This conference is a Satellite Conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians to be held at Hyderabad, India from 19-27 August, 2010.

The academic programme will consist of plenary and invited talks by eminent researchers in the field of Graph theory, Combinatorics and related topics from all parts of the world, contributed presentations and mini symposia on specific themes such as Algebraic Graph Theory, Metric Graph Theory and Graph Products, Graph Labeling and Graph Operators.

Scientific Committee

 * G.E. Andrews – USA
 * S. Arumugam - India
 * R. Balakrishnan – India
 * R.B. Bapat - India
 * W. Goddard – USA
 * M.C. Golumbic - Israel
 * G. Gutin – U.K
 * P. Hell - Canada
 * G.O.H. Katona - Hungary
 * S. Klavzar - Slovenia
 * J. Nesetril – Czech Republic
 * S.B. Rao – India
 * A. Raspaud - France
 * A. Rosa - Canada
 * S.S. Sane – India
 * V.T. Sos - Hungary
 * X. Zhu - Taiwan.

Contact
For more details, please contact Ambat Vijayakumar, Department of Mathematics, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Cochin-682 022, India.

Email: icrtgc2010 -at- gmail.com

Special session in Combinatorics at the 54th AMS annual meeting
There will be a special session in Combinatorics at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society which will take place at the University of Queensland, 27th - 30th September 2010. CMSA members are invited to participate.

The keynote speaker in the Combinatorics session will be Prof. Brendan McKay from the Australian National University.

Registration and submission of talk details is available online at: http://wt.maths.latrobe.edu.au/register/Conferences/AustMS2010/registration.php?header=1

Organizers

 * John Bamberg
 * Judy-Anne Osborn

Contact
More information regarding the conference can be found at http://www.smp.uq.edu.au/austms2010/.

34ACCMCC December 2010
The 34th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing will be held at the Australian National University, 6th - 10th December 2010.

Invited speakers include
 * Emeritus Professor Richard Brualdi, University of Wisconsin
 * Dr Darryn Bryant, University of Queensland
 * Dr Catherine Greenhill, University of New South Wales
 * Dr Petteri Kaski, University of Helsinki
 * Dr Ian Wanless, Monash University
 * Professor Catherine Yan, Texas A&M University

More information can be obtained from the conference website http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/events/34accmcc

A few useful conference webpages and a few upcoming conferences:

 * DMANET (Discrete Maths Net) and the TheoryNT List have lots of conferences listed in Combinatorics and Theoretical Computer Science respectively.


 * http://www.combinatorics.org/Conferences/


 * http://www.maths.qmw.ac.uk/~pjc/bcc/conferences.html


 * Upcoming conferences in Coding, Cryptography and Effective Algebra: http://www-rocq.inria.fr/codes/Anne.Canteaut/annonces.html.


 * Online version of the British Combinatorial Bulletin http://www.essex.ac.uk/maths/BCB/newsletters.htm.

= News and important announcements=

Professor Ralph Gordon Stanton passed away
Ralph Gordon Stanton, Distinguished Professor, Computer Science, passed away on April 21, 2010, in St Boniface hospital, at the age of 86. Stanton always preferred an uncomplicated life, and asked for little more than a shelf of good books, his stamp collection, a little good food, and some congenial company. His 61 year academic career was marked by many achievements and honours, and he will long be remembered for his teaching, mentorship and supervisory skills, and for his philanthropic generosity. In Memory Of Ralph Gordon Stanton.

Successful workshop on the Hadamard Maximal Determinant Problem


A workshop on the Hadamard Maximal Determinant Problem was held 13-17 May, 2010, within the Mathematical Sciences Institute at the Australian National University.

The workshop began on Thursday with ANU MSI's traditional afternoon tea and a departmental colloquium by Professor Jennifer Seberry, who gave a well attended and received presentation about her many contributions to the early days of Hadamard matrices and computing.

Friday and Saturday were full days of talks and workshop about the maximal determinant problem and the latest developments in Hadamard matrices. Several participants who had primarily worked on either the maximal determinant problem, or on Hadamard orders specifically, enjoying learning about each other's perspectives. The days were interspersed with delicious morning and afternoon teas.

The workshop offered other opportunities for pleasant dining, with dinners at the China Tea House in Dickson on Thursday, at Boffin's restaurant in University House on Friday evening and at Fekerte's Ethiopian Cuisine on Saturday; as well as a relaxing lunch at Spicy Ginger Cafe in Acton on Saturday afternoon.

On Monday the workshop wrapped up with a seminar by Dr William Orrick on a problem which subsumes both the Hadamard Conjecture and the maximal determinant problem: namely the `spectrum problem' for binary matrices, presented in the seminar series of the Computational Mathematics Group within the Centre for Mathematics and Its Applications.

Funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence MASCOS (Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems) and the ANU-INRIA Associate Team ANC (Algorithms, Numbers, Computing) allowed our international visitors to be present and for visitors to stay on campus at University House and Liversidge Court Apartments for this very enjoyable and productive workshop.

Speakers at the workshop and their topics were:


 * Professor Richard Brent, ANU `Decomposing Gram Matrices'
 * Professor Kathryn Horadam, RMIT `Hadamard Matrices and Their Applications: an update'
 * Dr Paul Leopardi, ANU `Amicability graphs and Clifford algebras'
 * Professor Charles Little, Massey University `A possible approach to the Hadamard Conjecture using Coding Theory'
 * Dr William Orrick, Indiana University, Bloomington. `Codes and the structure of Hadamard matrices' and `Range and distribution of determinants of binary matrices'
 * Dr Judy-anne Osborn, ANU `Visualizing searches for Maximal Determinant Matrices'
 * Professor Jennifer Seberry, University of Wollongong, `Progress in Hadamard Matrices via Computers' and `How Progress in Orthogonal Designs and Sequences have led to Progress in Hadamard Matrices via Computers'
 * Dr Paul Zimmermann, INRIA, Nancy `An Implementation of Orrick's Algorithm'

Abstracts are available on the workshop website at http://gan.anu.edu.au/~osborn/maxDetWorkshop/maxDetWorkshop.html

Employment opportunities

 * Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland (Applications by 20th August 2010)

=Recent news of CMSA members and others=

Dr. Rebecca Robinson won the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal
Dr. Rebecca Robinson's PhD thesis won the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal for the best PhD thesis in the Faculty of IT at Monash for 2009. Rebecca's PhD work was supervised by A. Prof. Graham Farr.

Congratulations Rebecca!

Douglas S. Stones has completed his PhD
Douglas S. Stones has successfully completed his PhD studies at Monash University supervised by Dr Ian M. Wanless. His PhD thesis deals with Latin Rectangles, titled "On the number of Latin rectangles".

Congratulations Douglas!

Arun Prasath Mani has completed his PhD
Arun Prasath Mani has successfully completed his PhD studies at Monash University supervised by A. Prof. Graham Farr. Arun's PhD thesis is titled "Correlation inequalities for Tutte polynomials".

Congratulations Arun!

=The Australasian Journal of Combinatorics=

The web page for the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics is at http://ajc.maths.uq.edu.au/.

The Journal is published three times per year, in February, June and October. CMSA Members are entitled to a $10 discount per volume.

There is a search facility for past authors and for keywords in the titles of papers. Instructions to authors are also available at this web site.

The contents of all volumes, 1 to 47, are listed at the above web page. We also now have free public access to the full papers in Volumes 1 to 35 inclusive. All but the last four years are available for free.

Submissions to the Australas. J. Combin. may be sent to ajc at maths.uq.edu.au. Electronic submissions are encouraged. For paper submissions, please check the web page.

=Editor= Eyal Loz,

Australia.

Email: eyal at eyal.com.au