9802078 McNulty This award provides support for the Big Sky Conferences on Discrete Mathematics. This is a series of three conferences to be held at the University of Montana. The goals of the Big Sky are (1) to bring together researchers from the geographical area with interests in discrete mathematics in order for them to meet, share research interests, and present recent results, and (2) to provide an opportunity for students, teachers, and other mathematicians in the region to learn more about contemporary mathematics. The conference will begin with a keynote address by a prominent mathematician that will be aimed at a general audience. During the conference, there will be an invited lecture from a successful researcher in discrete mathematics as well as contributed talks by regional participants. In addition, there will be special activities organized for undergraduate students giving them the opportunity to interact with active researchers. This conference is in the general area of combinatorics. One of the goals of combinatorics is to find efficient methods of studying how discrete collections of objects can be arranged or effectively enumerated. The behavior of discrete systems is extremely important to modern communications. For example, the design of large networks, such as those occurring in telephone systems, and the design of algorithms in computer science deal with discrete sets of objects, and this makes use of combinatorial research.
