Twenty-First Cumberland Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing

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ABSTRACT Twenty-First Cumberland Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing Mark N. Ellingham An international research conference in the area of discrete mathematics and computer science will be held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee from 15th to 17th May, 2008. The conference is the Twenty-First Cumberland Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing. The Cumberland Conference is an annual conference held to bring together researchers in discrete mathematics and computer science in the mid-south and southeast. It was first held in 1988, and has been held every year since then. The venue changes from year to year, moving around between universities. Many outstanding researchers have given principal talks at previous Cumberland Conferences. The conference focuses on combinatorics, graph theory and computing. These areas form the essential theoretical background for much of our modern information infrastructure, and for many modern methods of optimizing activities such as transportation and scheduling. Tools from these areas are used in areas as diverse as ecology, communication networks such as the Internet, economics and business, and military logistics. The conference aims to promote interaction between researchers, to allow for the dissemination of the most recent research results, and to publicize the importance of these areas in modern society. The conference is expected to have about 100 participants.There will be five principal hour speakers and about sixty contributed talks, each of fifteen or twenty minutes' duration, in two or three parallel sessions. At the time of writing, Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi (National Institute of Informatics, Japan), Neil Robertson (Ohio State University), Akira Saito (Nihon University, Japan), and Bjarne Toft (University of Southern Denmark) have accepted invitations to be principal speakers. The conference is organized by Mark Ellingham and Gexin Yu, both of Vanderbilt University. Besides being a meeting place for mathematicians and computer scientists from the southeast, the conference will have a focus on two special areas designed to stimulate future research. There will be forward-looking focused sessions on Matchings, Factors and Factorizations, and on Hadwiger's Conjecture. These are currently very active areas of research, and these sessions should attract attendance from strong researchers from a wider area. In addition, the conference will be dedicated in honor of Mike Plummer's 70th birthday, and these are two topics in which Mike has worked. There will be principal speakers and special contributed talk sessions in each of these two areas.