This award supports a conference on Design Theory, Coding Theory, and Cryptography, which is to be organized by Professor Lindner, at Auburn University. The combinatorics group at Auburn has been an extremely active group. This meeting will bring together experts from all over the world. The organizers will make a concerted effort to bring in minority graduate students to the conference. The participation of these graduate students will enhance their abilities to participate more fully in mathematical research. The research is in the general area of combinatorics. Combinatorics attempts to find efficient methods to study how discrete collections can be organized. The behavior of discrete systems is extremely important to modern communications. For example, the design of large networks, as in telephone systems, and the design of algorithms in computer science all deal with discrete objects, and this makes use of combinatorial research.
