Contemporary Combinatorics 2008 Memphis, TN, March 28--29
The aim of this conference is to bring together a group of outstanding mathematicians loosely connected to combinatorics, understood in the widest sense. This year the emphasis will be on group theory and number theory. The meeting will give a chance to mathematicians from the Mid-South to benefit not only from the lectures but also from personal contacts with the speakers.
The main speaker at the conference is one of the most distinguished mathematicians today, Professor John Thompson of the University of Florida, Fields Medalist and Wolf Prize winner. There will be several other exciting speakers at the meeting; they have been chosen because they are not only excellent mathematicians, but also wonderful expositors and very approachable people. Among other speakers, we shall have Andras Sarkozy of the Eotvos University of Budapest, one of the most frequent collaborators of Paul Erdos, who has made major contributions to additive number theory; Vojtech Rodl of Emory University, one of the most powerful combinatorialists today, who has greatly extended Szemeredi's Regularity Lemma; Cameron Stewart of the University of Waterloo, who has done important work on combinatorial number theory; Florian Luca of the National University of Mexico, who has proved several conjectures of Paul Erdos in number theory; Balazs Szegedy of the University of Toronto, who has been proved deep results in study of the limits of graph sequences, a substantial project started by Lovasz, Borgs, Chayes, Sos and Vesztergombi. Andras Sarkozy, who has had a vast experience teaching undergraduates and graduates, will give a special `public' lecture aimed at a very wide audience, including some of the best high school students from the area.
Unlike the East Coast or the Bay Area on the West Coast, the Mid-South cannot boast of many high-level mathematical conferences; the Contemporary Combinatorics 2008 meeting in Memphis goes some way towards redressing the balance. The formula whereby personal contacts between the lecturers and the other participants is greatly encouraged has been found very successful so far, so this is what we are planning for this year as well. There is no doubt that listening to lectures by John Thompson, Andras Sarkozy, Vojtech Rodl, and others, and, especially, talking to them during the conference will be very inspiring for young and established mathematicians alike. The NSF grant is absolutely vital for the success of the meeting; most of it will be used to help graduate students and senior mathematicians come to Memphis so that they can benefit from the lectures and the personal contact with the speakers.
