COMBINATORIAL MATHEMATICS SOCIETY OF AUSTRALASIA (INC)

INTRODUCTION:

Thank you to the members who have sent information for this newsletter. Please send news as soon as you have anything of possible interest to CMSA Members and the Combinatorial Community, even if there is no newsletter imminent!
Please email the Newsletter Editor on ejb@maths.uq.edu.au.

CLOSING DATE for Issue 11:   31 January 2003.  

CMSA WEB PAGE:   http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~db/CMSA/cmsa.html

NEWSLETTER WEB VERSIONS: (complete list)   http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~ejb/cmsa-newsletters.html

CMSA CONFERENCE HISTORY PAGE (all past conferences organised under the CMSA; thanks to Kevin McAvaney for starting this page)   http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/cdmc/history.html

CONTENTS:

• AIMS of the newsletter
• NEWS from the CMSA PRESIDENT
• RECENT CONFERENCE REPORTS
• AWOCA 2002   Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms, 6-10 JULY 2002.
• Discrete Mathematics Session within the 46th AustMS Meeting, Newcastle, 30 SEPT - 3 OCT 2002.
• FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS
• Victoria Algebra Days   Deakin University, Vic., Australia, 28-29 OCT 2002.
• XVIth Midwestern CCCC   XVIth Midwest Conference on Combinatorics, Cryptography and Computing, 7-9 NOV 2002.
• 27ACCMCC   University of Newcastle, 9-13 DEC 2002.
• NZMRI Summer Workshop,   New Plymouth, New Zealand, 4-11 JAN 2003.
• Permutation Patterns - 2003 University of Otago, New Zealand, 10-14 FEB 2003.
• Graph Theory of Brian Alspach   Simon Fraser University, 25-29 MAY 2003.
• 3rd Pythagorean Conf on Geometry, Combinatorial Designs, Cryptology & Related Structures   Faliraki, Rodos, Greece, 1-7 JUNE 2003.
• British Combinatorial Conference   Bangor, Wales, 29 JUNE - 4 JULY 2003.
• ICIAM 2003   International Congress on Indistrial & Applied Mathematics, Sydney, 7-11 JULY 2003.
• International Conf on Recent Advances in Statistical Designs and Related Combinatorics   National Technical University of Athens 7-9 JULY 2003.
• LOOPS 2003 Charles University and the Czech University of Agriculture 10-17 AUGUST 2003.
• RECENT NEWS OF CMSA MEMBERS and VISITORS
• Peter Adams and Darryn Bryant and news of their success
• Ian Roberts with news about his sabbatical
• Richard Bean with news from Iran
• David Glynn, with news of visitors to the Quantum Error Correction Project in Christchurch, NZ
• Rebecca Gower, with some news of a job advertisement (at Linz, Austria)
• AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS

AIMS of the newsletter:

• to promote combinatorics within Australasia
• to provide a forum for sharing combinatorial and related information
• to keep CMSA Members informed and in touch with combinatorial and related matters

NEWS from the PRESIDENT

New Zealand already has its Mathematical Research Institute http://www.nzima.auckland.ac.nz/NZMRI.html and Institute of Mathematics & its Applications http://www.nzima.auckland.ac.nz/

Perhaps the most mathematically significant thing happening in Australia recently is the establishment of its own Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, AMSI. See http://www.amsi.org.au/ for details (but this is so new, you won't find too much there).

One thing which is firmly planned right now by AMSI is a set of summer courses for honours and postgraduate students.

Another is the call for expressions of interest for symposia/workshops for the year 2003.

Approximately in the words of the Interim Director, Tony Guttmann, this Institute has a more ambitious scope than its overseas counterparts, with (down to) a fifth or tenth of the funding ... not sure if he is referring to the NZ institute here. Our Canadian members probably get the idea quite accurately though.

Let me close by hoping that as many of you as possible can make it to Newcastle in December for the 27 ACCMCC.

Nick Wormald
CMSA President

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RECENT CONFERENCE REPORTS

AWOCA 2002         Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms, 6-10 JULY 2002.

The Thirteenth Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms (AWOCA) was held on Fraser Island, Queensland, from 7th to 10th July in the very peaceful surrounds of Kingfisher Bay Resort.

Participants enjoyed lavish lunches, picturesque sunsets, an excursion to the exquisite white sand, pure freshwater lakes, and some karaoke at the conference dinner. The only unfortunate event (apart from some of the karaoke acts) was a collision between a cow and a University of Queensland vehicle on the return trip to Brisbane. Thankfully the cow was the only fatality; the only injured person was driver Peter Adams who spent the night in Gympie hospital and suffered a badly mangled broken toe. But we were all extremely grateful Peter had ensured that we were wearing seatbelts.

The invited speakers were:

• Curt Lindner, Auburn University, USA
  A brief history of the embedding of partial 4-cycle systems
• Kunsoo Park, Seoul National University, Korea
  Parallel Algorithms for Dictionary Operations on Balanced Search Trees
• Chris Rodger, Auburn University, USA
  Edge-colorings, hamilton cycles and graph decompositions
• Heather Gavlas, University of Vermont, USA
  Hamiltonian Paths in Cartesian Powers of Directed Cycles
• Edy Tri Baskoro, ITB, Indonesia
  On the graph Ramsey Numbers R(G,W_m)
• Frantisek Franek, MacMaster University, Canada
  Computing quasi suffix arrays

A special thank-you to the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Queensland, the EPSA Faculty at UQ, and the ICA for their sponsorship, and a very special thank-you to Diane Donovan who was the chief organiser. Photos from the conference are available from the website: www.maths.uq.edu.au/~njc/awoca/awoca2002
[Scroll up a bit if you click on "Photos" at that site! Ed.]

Nick Cavenagh

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DISCRETE MATHEMATICS SESSION within the 46th AustMS Meeting, Newcastle, 30 SEPT - 3 OCT 2002.

Ten talks were presented in the Special Session on Discrete Mathematics at the recent Australian Mathematical Society's Annual Meeting in Newcastle. These were presented by:

• Lynn Batten   Blocking semiovals of type (1,m+1,n+1)
• Diana Combe   Magic labellings of graphs over abelian groups
• Peter Eades   How to make a symmetric drawing of a graph
• Henning Fernau   Using graph theory to design parameterized algorithms
• John Galati   Affine planar maps and quasiregular collineation groups of finite projective planes
• Alain LeBel   Shift actions on cocycles: a case study
• Jim MacDougall   Magic labelings of graphs
• Bill Palmer   Bhaskar Rao designs and the groups of order 12
• Rinovia Simanjuntak   A Moore bound for graphs embedded in surfaces
• Martin Sutton   A real-world database problem for discrete mathematicians

At the conference dinner the following was circulated on some tables:

Uncle Ebenezer is dying. He has exactly 500 gold pieces, all of which he distributes amongst his four nephews, Abraham, Bob, Cecil and Dwayne. Each nephew gets his share in a little bag. They do not know what the others got, but they do know:

1.   That everybody got more tha 100 pieces.
2.   That Cecil and Dwayne got an equal number of pieces.
3.   Abe's and Bob's shares are different from Cecil and Dwayne.
4.   Abe's share is not the same as Bob's.

Each nephew counts out his share in secret. Then Cecil says to Bob: "Did you get a perfect square?" Bob does not answer truthfully. (You are not told whether his answer was "yes" or "no".) Cecil believes Bob, and on the basis of Bob's answer concludes that Bob got the most. Abraham, sitting by, smiles to himself because he has deduced that Bob lied. How many pieces did each nephew get?

(There is a solution, and only one solution. There is enough information to solve the problem. There are no tricks. No mathematical ability is called for beyond knowledge of which numbers are perfect squares. A solution depends on logical thinking and some psychological insight.)

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FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Victoria Algebra Days

Deadline for contributed talks is 7 OCTOBER!

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The XVIth Midwestern CCCC

Invited speakers include:

• Saad El-Zanati, Illinois State University
• Peter Horak, University of Kuwait
• Curt Lindner, Auburn University
• Vladimir Tonchev, Michigan Technological University

Twenty-minute contributed talks are invited. Abstracts are due by October 15, 2002.

See the web site at http://www.unlv.edu/Colleges/Sciences/Mathematics/16thMCCCC.html for further details.

The Organizing Committee:
W.D. Wallis (Mathematics, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale)
Nick Phillips (Computer Science, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale)
Michelle Schultz (Mathematical Sciences, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)

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The 27th ACCMCC

• Dragos Cvetkovic   (University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia),   graph theory and combinatorics
• Jerrold Griggs   (University of South Carolina, U.S.A.),   extremal set theory and extremal graph theory
• Mirka Miller   (University of Newcastle, NSW),   graph theory
• Ron Mullin   (University of Waterloo, Canada),   combinatorial designs and network security
• Alex Rosa   (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada),   combinatorial designs
• Jozef Siran   (Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia),   topological graph theory
• Ralph Stanton   (University of Manitoba, Canada),   combinatorial designs and graph theory

The 27ACCMCC web page is http://www.cs.newcastle.edu.au/~accmcc/.

Abstracts can now be submitted online through the web site, and a registration form is available there. The closing date for abstracts, and for early-bird registration, is 18 November 2002.

There is a Prize for the best Student Talk, awarded by the CMSA.

Any enquiries, please email either accmcc@cs.newcastle.edu.au   or   lbrankov@cs.newcastle.edu.au

Ljiljana Brankovic

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New Zealand MRI Summer Workshop

This year the annual NZMRI summer workshop will be based in beautiful New Plymouth in the North Island of New Zealand. This follows previous workshops in Huia (1994), Tolaga Bay (1996, 1997), Napier (1998, 2002), Raglan (1999), Kaikoura (2000), and Nelson (2001).

The topic for New Plymouth (2003), will be Combinatorics and Combinatorial Aspects of Biology although this will be interpreted broadly.

See the web site at www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~mathmeet

Our speakers currently include (in no particular order):

• Karl Broman (Johns Hopkins University, Recombination Mapping)
• Mike Hallett (Magill University, Parametric Aspects of Computational Biology)
• Neil Robertson (Ohio State University, The Graph Minors Project)
• Martin Grohe (University of Edinburgh, Logical Aspects of Graphs)
• Andreas Dress (University of Bielefeld, Overview of Combinatorial Biology)
• Tandy Warnow (University of Texas, Mathematical Aspects of Phylogeny)
• Lior Pachter (University of California, Berkeley, Genefinding)
• Terry Speed (University of California, Berkeley, Mathematical Aspects of Gene Expression)
• Richard Stanley (MIT, Enumerative Combinatorics).

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Permutation Patterns - 2003

Permutation Patterns - 2003 will be held at the University of Otago, New Zealand, 10 - 14 February 2003.

See   http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/mike/PP2003/FirstAnnouncement.html   for more information, and for a link to the Second Announcement also.

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Graph Theory of Brian Alspach, GTBA 2003

Brian Alspach is 65 next year and we are celebrating his birthday in a spectacular "Graph Theory of Brian Alspach" conference from May 25 to 29, 2003 on the beautiful campus of Simon Fraser University.

Visit the conference web site:   http://www.cs.uleth.ca/gtba

If you wish to be put on our mailing list, please send e-mail to Hadi Kharaghani at hadi@cs.uleth.ca.

CONTRIBUTED TALKS:
There will be a number of 20 minute contributed talks. Abstracts for contributed talks will be reviewed for conference presentation. There will be a special issue of Discrete Mathematics devoted to papers from the conference. The refereeing for all papers submitted for possible publication in the special issue will be according to the high standards of Discrete Mathematics. Abstracts for the papers can be submitted using an on-line submission form available at the above web site.

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Third Pythagorean Conference on Geometry, Combinatorial Designs, Cryptology and Related Structures

Faliraki, Rodos, Greece 1-7 JUNE 2003.

See the web site (under construction) at http://zeus.math.fau.edu/pythag3/

Invited Speakers include:

• Aart Blokhuis
• Charlie Colbourn
• Gerhard Frey
• Klaus Metsch
• Doug Stinson

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British Combinatorial Conference

Bangor, Wales, 29 JUNE - 4 JULY 2003.

See the web site http://www.informatics.bangor.ac.uk/public/math/bcc2003/index.html for details.

Invited speakers include:

• Lars Andersen, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Simon Blackburn, Royal Holloway, UK
• Alexandre Borovik, UMIST, UK
• Pavol Hell, Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Dieter Jungnickel, University of Augsburg, Germany
• Imre Leader, DPMMS, Cambridge, UK
• Arun Ram, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
• Anne Street, Queensland, Australia
• Gunter M. Ziegler, Institute of Mathematics, Technical University of Berlin, Germany

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ICIAM 2003

International Congress on Indistrial & Applied Matehmatics, Sydney, 7-11 JULY 2003.

Please see http://www.iciam.org for all details about ICIAM 2003.

One of the embedded meetings will be the Sixth Australia - New Zealand Mathematics Convention, and there will be mini-symposia involving various aspects of combinatorics.
The web page for this embedded meeting (which you can find through the ICIAM site) is http://www.austms.org.au/People/Conf/ANZ03/ .

The early bird registration is 29 November 2002.

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International Conference on Recent Advances in Statistical Designs and Related Combinatorics

National Technical University of Athens, 7-9 JULY 2002.

This is in honour of Stratis Kounias.

Organisers are:

• Ch A Charalambides (Univ of Athens)
• C Koukouvinos (National Tech Univ of Athens)
• C Moyssiadis (Univ of Thessaloniki)
• J Seberry (Univ of Wollongong)

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LOOPS 2003

Charles University and the Czech University of Agriculture, 10-17 AUGUST 2003.

See the web site at   http://adela.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~loops03/   for details.

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A very useful website giving upcoming conferences in Coding, Cryptography and Effective Algebra AND their deadlines is
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/codes/Anne.Canteaut/annonces.html .

RECENT NEWS OF CMSA MEMBERS and others:

Peter Adams, Darryn Bryant and Jonathan Keith

(all from the Department of Mathematics at UQ) and Keith Mitchelson (from the Australian Genome Research Facility at UQ) have received a $250,000 grant from the Biotechnology Innovation Fund (BIF). This is the maximum size for BIF grants, and the money will be used to fund research, development and commercialisation of a novel DNA sequencing technology. The spin-out company Combinomics is being formed, to undertake the development. BIF is funded by the Federal Government, and is a merit-based competitive grants program which aims to increase the rate of commercialisation of Australian biotechnology discoveries. It provides funding assistance to companies to demonstrate proof-of-concept between the research and commercialisation stages.

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News from Ian Roberts (Northern Territory University when he's not travelling!), who writes:

I am currently on a long-deserved and long-needed sabbatical (or PDL - professional development leave in NTU speak). My itinery is roughly:

San Diego State (David Carlson) 4-13/9,
University of Wisconsin (Sergei Bezrukov) 13-27/9,
MIGHTY - Mid West Graph Theory Conference at Illinois State at Bloomington-Normal (Roger Eggleton),
Southern Illinois University 28-2/10 (Wal Wallis),
South Carolina (Jerry Griggs) till 22/10
with a quick trip to Clemson for a conference 10-11/10,
Reading (Tony Hilton) (UK) till 2/11,
Bielefeld, Rostock (Uwe Leck) and Magdeburg in Germany 2-16/11,
then Nottingham (Neville Davies)(UK)
and home before the end of November.

See you all at 27ACCMCC in Newcastle.

The trip has been good so far, with lots of new problems and ideas and even some solutions. Round-the-world fares are a good way to go. Jeanette McLeod is teaching my first year class in discrete maths while I'm away and Prabhu Manyem at the University of South Australia is helping out with a third level subject from his place with Jeanette as local tutor.

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Richard Bean writes from Iran:

I am working as a post-doctoral researcher in combinatorics at the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics in Tehran, Iran. This position is a two year position.

I have done some more work on the largest size of critical sets in Latin squares, and am learning about graph embedding problems and chess related problems (the latter for fun).

Richard Bean was recently awarded his PhD from the University of Queensland, with Diane Donovan as supervisor.

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Information from David Glynn:

Some visitors to QEC Project (Aotearoa)

• Assoc. Prof L.R.A. (Rey) Casse, Univ. of Adelaide, South Australia, December 2002
• Dr. Johannes Maks, Univ of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, January 2003
• Prof. Aaron Gulliver, Victoria Univ, Canada, February 2003

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Information from Rebecca Gower and job information at Linz

Rebecca Gower is working at a firm in Oxford, and she writes:

Don't know if this is of any interest to put in the CMSA newsletter. It was sent to me but I don't really know academics and graduates looking for jobs so perhaps the newsletter would reach those people?

Have just got back from a week's holiday in Ireland and I am just trying to catch up with emails and what needs attention now. The holiday was great - amazingly sunny and lovely for the time of year.

Subject: Job offer at the Algebra Group at Linz
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002
From: Erhard Aichinger
Organization: Division of Algebra, Univ. Linz

See the job offer at http://www.uni-linz.ac.at/ausschreibungen/817.htm

Erhard Aichinger, Univ. Linz, Austria

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The AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS :

The web page for the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics is at http://ajc.math.auckland.ac.nz/ . This has a search facility for past authors and for keywords in the titles of papers.
Instructions to authors are also available from this web site.

Volume 26 appeared in September 2002. The contents of all volumes, 1 to 26, are listed at the above web page.

Submissions to the AJC may be sent to ajc@maths.uq.edu.au . Electronic submissions are encouraged. For paper submissions, please check the web page.

The Australasian Journal of Combinatorics is published by the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia Inc.