This award supports the research of Professor C. Rodger to work in combinatorics. He will work on the embedding of partial latin squares of order n into latin squares of order less than or equal to 2n. He also intends to work on problems involving embedding triple systems and graph decompositions. The research crosses lines between the areas of combinatorics and statistics. Combinatorics attempts to find efficient methods to study how discrete collections of objects can be organized. And so it is extremely important to modern communications, for example the design of large networks as in telephone systems. The main object to be studied in the proposed research, latin squares, is a fundamental tool used in designing experiments and so in improving quality control in many areas of production within the economy.
