This award supports Professor Haas to organize a series of workshops in combinatorics and graph theory. These meetings will mainly be used as a forum for faculty and graduate students in New England to meet and exchange ideas. Meetings of this type have been held before and they have proven to be successful. In particular, they have the potential to have great impact in promoting the careers of the participants. Since these meetings have attracted a good number of women mathematicians, this represents a unique opportunity to increase the number of successful female mathematicians. The research is in the general area of combinatorics. Combinatorics attempts to find efficient methods to study how discrete collections can be organized. The behavior of discrete systems 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 all deal with discrete objects, and this makes use of combinatorial research.
