This award supports the research of Professor T. Zaslavsky to work in combinatorics. He intends to investigate surface embeddability of graphs, biased graphs, matroids satisfying a linear reduction law and coloring and chromatic polynomials of linearly representable matroids. The research is in the general area of combinatorics. 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 and the design of algorithms in computer science.