This award provides support for participation in the 31st Midwest Conference on Combinatorics and Combinatorial Computing (MCCCC), held at the University of West Georgia, October 20-22, 2017. This long-running conference series has a reputation for featuring recent relevant progress at the frontiers of combinatorial mathematics and computing. These fields are interesting on their own, and also have applications to other sciences and practical problems in areas including optimization, algorithms, and information processing. This conference will feature five plenary talks and an additional 50-70 shorter talks. Participants will include researchers from all career stages, from undergraduate students to distinguished senior researchers, which should help effect new and fruitful connections within the research community.
The 31st MCCCC will serve as a catalyst for major collaborative projects among mathematicians and computer scientists working in pure and applied combinatorics, particularly graph theory, design theory, enumeration, and combinatorial computing. It will give researchers an opportunity to share recent findings, exchange ideas, and discuss research problems. In order to aid in the advancement of future research, early-career mathematicians in particular will be recruited to attend. This includes graduate students and advanced undergraduates, some of whom participated in REU programs during 2015 and 2016. The proceedings of the conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing (JCMCC). The papers will go through the journals usual process. A conference website is maintained at: https://sites.google.com/a/westga.edu/mcccc31/
