This award will provide support for US participants, especially women, graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty, to attend the twenty-third and twenty-fourth international conferences entitled Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC), to be held, respectively, in Reykjavik, Iceland, and Nagoya, Japan.
The continuing success of the annual FPSAC conferences stems in part from their considerable interdisciplinary breadth -- linking leading researchers in combinatorial mathematics with strong researchers in allied fields drawn from pure and applied mathematics, theoretical computer science, physics, and biology. The span of this conference series is unique among international conferences with an emphasis on combinatorial mathematics. The principal topics featured during the FPSAC 2011 and 2012 conferences will be algebraic, geometric, and enumerative combinatorics. The emphasis will be on applications in physics, biology, and computer science and on relations to other areas of mathematics such as algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, K-theory, geometric group theory, representation theory, and symplectic geometry.
This grant supported the Twenty-third (2011) and Twenty-fourth (2012) Annual International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics. In 2011, the conference was in Reykjavik, Iceland and in 2012, it took place in Nagoya, Japan. Each conference had over 200 attendees from all over the world. The format is roughly the same each year: about eight invited speakers and about 27 refereed contributed talks. It is the main conference in algebraic combinatorics and attendence is important for keeping up with developments in the area and for networking. The grant helped bring about 25 gradstudents/junior researchers from US institutions to each of the two conferences. Here are a few comments from people supported by the grant. From FPSAC 2011 "...for the second consecutive year, being at FPSAC has led to me meeting new people who have subsequently invited me to speak at their seminars." "FPSAC 2011 was the best experience I have had as a student in mathematics. Aside from easily the best networking experience I have had as a graduate student, it also offered a unique chance to see the top combinatorists in the world present their research. To be surrounded by so many people in my field made me realize that my own research is not in a bubble, and that other people share my interests and ideas." "I presented my results in the form of a poster and one of the people who talked with me about my poster made some excellent comments about ... which looks like it will lead to another paper. " FPSAC 2012 "FPSAC provided a stage for me to let the combinatorics community know that I was back in math after a year away. As a result of this, I've had many more people contacting me, both to invite me to give talks at seminars and also to have conversations about mathematics. It was a great way to re-ignite my career in mathematics. Since I wasunemployed at the time of the conference, having funding was crucial to my ability to attend." "At FPSAC, I got to meet ..., which was both fun ... and a great networking opportunity - from him, I heard about a job opening.... Also at FPSAC, I received comments and suggestions on my work from mathematicians who have worked on similar problems, such as ....,as well as heard about different interpretations of my research and connections to other areas. This has led to a forthcoming extension of my paper."
