Conference Update

I have written about certain conference arrangements earlier (here and here). As it turns out, the conference which I was preparing for went smoothly which is a relief. I thought it would be appropriate to tell you how things went:

The 19^th Postgraduate Combinatorial Conference (PCC) was held at the University of Warwick. The event which is held annually under the auspices of the British Combinatorial Committee (BCC) was hosted this year by DIMAP (Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications). PCC has been held previously at St Andrews, Glamorgan, Oxford, Queen Mary and Nottingham in the last few years. DIMAP’s area of interest is in discrete modelling, algorithmic analysis, and combinatorial (discrete) optimization. Therefore it was fitting that PCC was hosted by DIMAP this year.

The conference started with a short welcome note by Prof. Mike Paterson. The general format of the conference was longer talks by invited speakers along with shorter contributed talks by participating postgraduates.

The first invited speaker of the event was Prof. Olivier Hudry from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Paris, who gave a survey on properties of tournament solutions. Prof. Imre Leader, from University of Cambridge was the invited speaker for the second day. His talk was on matchings and paths in the cube. Prof. Ian Stewart from University of Warwick gave an entertaining final talk on generic bifurcation in network dynamics and how problems in the area have curious combinatorial links.

Apart from the three invited speakers, there was a careers guidance session provided by Dr Jenny O’ Leary who has a physics background. The idea of a guidance session was useful considering the conference was geared towards postgraduates. There were thirty registered participants along with many other Warwick researchers in the audience. The contributed talks ranged from extremal graph theory, combinatorics on strings, partial orders, and linear extensions to combinatorial games.

The conference banquet was arranged in the Rootes social building on campus. The organizers of the event were Haris Aziz (local organizer), Manuela Heuer, Emil Vaughan, and Simon Griffiths. The conference was sponsored mainly by LMS with important contributions from Open University, BCC and DIMAP.