CMSA E-Newsletter 11

COMBINATORIAL MATHEMATICS SOCIETY OF AUSTRALASIA (INC)

CMSA E-Newsletter Number 11 (February 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 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:

* AIMS of the newsletter * Vale Bernhard H.Neumann * NEWS from the CMSA PRESIDENT * RECENT CONFERENCE REPORTS * FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS * RECENT NEWS OF CMSA MEMBERS and VISITORS * AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS * NEWSLETTER EDITOR WANTED
 * 27ACCMCC  University of Newcastle, 9-13 DECEMBER 2002
 * Permutation Patterns - 2003 University of Otago, New Zealand, 10-14 FEB 2003.
 * Graph Theory of Brian Alspach  Simon Fraser University, 25-29 MAY 2003.
 * 3rd Pythagorean Conf on Geometry, Combinatorial Designs, Cryptology & Related Structures  Faliraki, Rodos, Greece, 1-7 JUNE 2003.
 * British Combinatorial Conference  Bangor, Wales, 29 JUNE - 4 JULY 2003.
 * ICIAM 2003  International Congress on Indistrial & Applied Mathematics, Sydney, 7-11 JULY 2003.
 * International Conf on Recent Advances in Statistical Designs and Related Combinatorics  National Technical University of Athens 7-9 JULY 2003.
 * Combinatorics, Linear Algebra & Graph Coloring  IPM, Tehran, Iran 9-14 AUGUST 2003.
 * LOOPS 2003 Charles University and the Czech University of Agriculture 10-17 AUGUST 2003.
 * 28ACCMCC  Deakin University, Burwood campus, Melbourne 15-19 DECEMBER 2003.
 * Nick Cavenagh news of a postdoc in Prague
 * Diane Donovan promoted to Associate Professor
 * Ian Roberts sends news from the Northern Territory
 * Nicholas Hamilton with an update on his new job in Queensland
 * Other news snippets

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

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.

NEWS from the PRESIDENT

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:

* Dragos Cvetkovic, University of Belgrade Graphs with least eigenvalue greater than -2 * Peter Eades, University of Sydney Relational visualization * Jerrold R. Griggs, University of South Carolina Database security and concentrating sums of vectors * Mirka Miller, University of Newcastle Moore graphs and beyond * Ron Mullin, University of Waterloo Natural involutions on F2[x] with connections to factorization and enumeration * Alex Rosa, McMaster University k-factorizations of complete graphs * Ralph Stanton, University of Manitoba Perfect bicoverings with maximal block length four * Nick Wormald, University of Melbourne Counting connected graphs inside-out

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 lbrankov@cs.newcastle.edu.au

FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS: 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, and for a link to the Second Announcement also.

Graph Theory of Brian Alspach, GTBA 2003 Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, CANADA. May 25-29, 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.

Third Pythagorean Conference on Geometry, Combinatorial Designs, Cryptology and Related Structures

Faliraki, Rodos, Greece 1-7 JUNE 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

British Combinatorial Conference

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:

* 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, 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 web page for this embedded meeting (which you can find through the ICIAM site) is http://www.austms.org.au/People/Conf/ANZ03/.

The early bird registration is 29 November 2002.

International Conference on Recent Advances in Statistical Designs and Related Combinatorics

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:

* 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)

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, : 10-17 AUGUST 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 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):

* 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

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 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 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.

NEW NEWSLETTER EDITOR WANTED

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

REMINDER: Deadline for next issue of this Newsletter: 30 May, 2003. Elizabeth Billington, Dept Maths, University of Queensland, Qld 4072. Fax: +61 7 3365 1477 ejb@maths.uq.edu.au