This award provides support Rotafest, a conference in honor of the 64th birthday of Gian-Carlo Rota. The conference will be held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on April 17--20, 1996. The subject of the talks is not being restricted other than that they be connected to the work of Professor Rota. It is expected that most of the talks will be in combinatorics or algebraic combinatorics. The main object of the conference is to provide a perspective on the multitude of work that has taken place in these areas in the past thirty years and to provide impetus for further work. Combinatorics attempts to find efficient methods to study how discrete collections of objects can be arranged. The behavior of discrete systems is extremely important to modern communications. For example, the design of large networks, such as those occurring in telephone systems, and the design of algorithms in computer science deal with discrete sets of objects, and this makes use of combinatorial research. In addition, the type of enumerative information being sought in this project has been of use in the design of geometric algorithms for problems in robotics and motion planning.
