This award will provide funding for the "Great Plains Combinatorics Conference (GPCC) 2020" which will be held in Fargo, ND, during the weekend of April 25-26, 2020. The conference is being hosted by the Department of Mathematics at North Dakota State University. The GPCC is a regional conference series in combinatorics that has been held in 2014 and 2016 at the University of Kansas and in 2018 at Kansas State University. A large portion of the funding will support the participation of students, early-career faculty, and mathematicians belonging to underrepresented groups.
Many research universities in the western Great Plains have small groups (often just one or two faculty members) working in combinatorics, and the low concentration of universities means that combinatorialists are geographically isolated from each other. Accordingly, the Great Plains Combinatorics Conference (GPCC) was created in 2014 to provide an opportunity for combinatorialists in the Great Plains region to present and share their research and to develop connections between different areas of combinatorics. The meetings are held over a weekend, with most participants arriving on Friday evening. There are 4 plenary talks on Saturday, plus a graduate students poster session, and 3 plenary talks on Sunday morning, leaving participants enough time to travel back to their home institutions by Sunday night.
The following website has been created for the conference: https://sites.google.com/view/gpcc2020/
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
