Conference: Contemporary Combinatorics 2010

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This conference will bring together a group of outstanding mathematicians who work on topics loosely related to combinatorics, understood in the widest sense. The meeting will give a chance to mathematicians from the Mid-South to benefit not only from the lectures but also from personal contacts with the speakers. This is bound to be very inspiring for all the participants, especially for those who otherwise do not do not have a chance to come into close contact with some of today's the leading mathematicians. The main speaker at the conference is Gregory Margulis of Yale University, who has done much brilliant work in combinatorics, differential geometry, ergodic theory, dynamical systems and discrete subgroups of Lie groups. For his great contributions to mathematics he was awarded a Fields Medal in 1978, and a Wolf Prize in 2005. There will be several other excellent mathematicians and speakers at the meeting; they have been chosen because they are not only powerful research mathematicians, but also wonderful expositors and very approachable people. Among other speakers, we shall have Alexander Barvinok of University of Michigan, who has proved outstanding results about distance geometry, convexity and algorithms related to them; Ralph Faudree, one of the most frequent collaborators of the late Paul Erdos, who has done much work on Ramsey theory and extremal graph theory; Oliver Riordan of the University of Oxford, one of the most brilliant combinatorialists in the world, who has contributed to many areas, most recently to the theory of convergent sequences of sparse graphs; Laszlo Szekely of the University of South Carolina, who is well known for his very elegant contributions to discrete geometry; Slava Krushkal of the Unversity of Virginia, who has done outstanding work on polynomials of surfaces related to the Tutte polynomial; Tsz Ho Chan of the University of Memphis, the young analytic number theorist, who has worked on pair correlation of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function, diophantine approximation and the distribution of primes, Andras Gyarfas of the Computer and Automation Institute in Budapest, the prolific combinatorialist, who has done much work on applications of Szemeredi's Lemma, and Jean-Paul Thouvenot, a Director at CNRS in Paris, one of the foremost people working on ergodic theory and dynamical systems. Two of the lectures will be aimed at a general audience, including good high school students. In the first lecture, Ralph Faudree will not only introduce the audience to the immense contributions Paul Erdos made to mathematics, but will also paint a personal picture of Erdos, one of the most colourful mathematicians of the 20th century. In the second lecture Gregory Margulis will attempt to bring difficult mathematical ideas concerning geometry within reach of the audience. Unlike the East Coast or the Bay Area on the West Coast, the Mid-South cannot boast of many high-level mathematical conferences; the Contemporary Combinatorics 2010 meeting in Memphis goes some way towards redressing the balance. The formula whereby personal contacts between the lecturers and the other participants is greatly encouraged has been found very successful so far, so this is what we are planning for this year as well. There is no doubt that listening to lectures by Gregory Margulis, Alexander Barvinok, Oliver Riordan and others, and, especially, talking to them during the conference will be very inspiring for young and established mathematicians alike.