This award supports the research of Professor P. Edelman to work in combinatorics. He intends to investigate the combinatorics of hyperplane arrangements. This will include a detailed study of the counterexample to Orlik's conjecture and a continuation of work on h-complexes and h-shellings. 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.
