The Department of Mathematics at Texas State University plans to host an annual Combinatorics conference on April 24-25, 2010. The two-day conference is part of the CombinaTexas Conference Series, held annually at a different college or university in Texas since the year 2000. The conference program includes five one-hour invited talks delivered by internationally recognized researchers. These invited talks will cover recent results and open problems in the fields of Algebraic Combinatorics, Algebraic Geometry, Combinatorial Optimization, Computational Combinatorics, Quantum Graph Theory and Geometric Graph Theory, as well as applications in Network Analysis, Coding Theory and Protein Folding. In addition, the conference includes several sessions of contributed papers, a poster session, and social events to encourage communication and collaboration among participants. Special emphasis is given to the participation of graduate students and junior faculty in Combinatorics and its applications.
The CombinaTexas conferences serve as the only regular gathering for the increasing number of researchers in the field of Combinatorics in Texas and neighboring states. The conferences provide a forum to foster scientific collaboration and to develop research networks among researchers from a large number of very diverse institutions in a large geographic region. In particular, these conferences enhance the experiences of graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs, broadening their mathematical outlook and helping them create a network of experts within their fields. The CombinaTexas Conference Series has become a major regional activity both, for researchers and educators. CombinaTexas will continue to broaden and diversify participation and to enhance the infrastructure for research and education.
NSF Award ID 1012190 The 11th meeting of the CombinaTexas Conference Series was held at Texas State University (San Marcos, TX) on April 24-25, 2010. The organizing committee of CombinaTexas‘10 consisted of three members: Daniela Ferrero (Texas State University), Art Duval (The University of Texas-El Paso) and Eunjeong Yi (Texas A&M University- Galveston). The conference topics ranged over a variety of areas around the special focus, including quantum combinatorics, graph theory and combinatorial games. The following is a list of invited speakers and the tile of the plenary talks they delivered. 1. Gregory Berkolaiko (Texas A&M University): Combinatorics of semiclassical evaluation in quantum chaos. 2. Eddie Cheng (Oakland University): Structural properties of some interconnection networks. 3. Kiran Chilakamarri (Texas Southern University): The unit distance graph problems. 4. Gretchen Matthews (Clemson University): Pseudocodewords via a lifted fundamental cone. 5. Ezra Miller (Duke University): Lattice point methods for combinatorial games. In addition, there were 60 registered participants, and about 80 people attended the lectures. We received 21 contributed talks, which is the usual number of submissions received at Combinatexas conferences. We accepted all of them, but 5 participants could not attend the conference and deliver their talks (three of them because of visa problems). Among the participants, over 40% were minorities or from under-represented groups, including two plenary speakers, and nine participants who contributed talks. Over 70% of the participants were graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty. Our participants came from Texas and the surrounding states, as well as other parts of United States, including Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana and South Carolina. At CombinaTexas 2010 also participated researchers from Mexico and China. The CombinaTexas Conference is committed to the strengthening and enrichment of the mathematics personnel base. This conference was supported by the National Science Foundation and by Texas State University. All travel expenses for plenary speakers and partial support for participants were funded by the NSF grant. In addition, we funded 19 participants. The Department of Mathematics at Texas State University provided support staff and assumed the costs of publicity, catering and conference materials. More information on CombinaTexas 2010 is available at the conference homepage: http://uweb.txstate.edu/~df20/Combinatexas.html.
