This award provides support for the conference "Celebration of Combinatorics 2014," which will be held at MIT from June 23 to June 27, 2014. The conference is devoted to recent developments in combinatorics, especially in algebraic, enumerative, geometric, and topological combinatorics. It is focused on connections between different areas of combinatorics and between combinatorics and other fields such as commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, representation theory, and topology. The following list of topics shows the research emphasis of the conference: simplicial complexes, combinatorics and convex geometry, combinatorial representation theory, combinatorial aspects of Schubert calculus, combinatorics of total positivity and cluster algebras, the theory of hyperplane arrangements, combinatorial commutative algebra, the theory of symmetric functions. This conference will enable the many researchers working in the area of combinatorics to learn from each other. It will promote further development of applications of combinatorics.
Combinatorics is an area of mathematics concerning the study of discrete structures. A typical question of enumerative combinatorics is "How to count (structures of some kind)?" Combinatorial problems arise in many areas of pure and applied mathematics, computer science, physics, and other sciences. In recent years, combinatorial techniques were successfully applied to a range of various problems from finding efficient algorithms to understanding fundamental physics of particles.
