Further Advancing the Northeast Combinatorics Network

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The Northeast Combinatorics Network (NCN) will host several events including Spring and Fall Discrete Math Day (DMD) conferences and a Summer Combo conference as well as a Virtual Combinatorics Colloquium series in each year of the three-year project. The Spring 2018 DMD will be hosted at UMass Amherst, https://sites.google.com/view/umass-dms/dmdspring19, and universities in the region are being given the opportunity to host the remaining five DMD meetings. This project aims to further cultivate and enhance a network of students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty and industry mathematicians spread across the institutions in New England and New York working in the area of combinatorics (discrete mathematics), which is a thriving and rapidly advancing mathematical discipline. Motivated by applications to computer science, data science, cybersecurity, bioinformatics and more, combinatorialists have developed powerful new tools in recent years and have identified fundamental mathematical problems that, if solved, will have far-reaching impact in these applied areas. Connections to other areas of mathematics abound as well. This project puts particular emphasis on service to students and faculty, particularly women and members of other groups underrepresented in STEM disciplines. The project's design particularly targets students and faculty at small, more remote institutions, a cohort that has made significant contributions to the field. With three one-day meetings per year as anchor activities, the project envisions an intentional infrastructure that facilitates ongoing interactions among researchers throughout the year. The PIs, together with the rest of the NCN leadership (meeting hosts and Steering Committee) will advance a set of activities that, while low in cost, provide key resources to researchers in the region. These activities include: a central NCN website to improve communication and collaboration, the Virtual Combinatorics Colloquium series that allows remote viewing and interaction, a series of "New Directions" presentations of accessible problem areas to foster undergraduate research and also engage early career faculty, and an on-line discussion forum that extends collaborative interactions that may start at any one of the regular meetings. These activities, taken as a whole, will advance fundamental science, foster connections to applied areas, and enhance outreach beyond the traditional research university community. The NCN website is https://sites.google.com/view/northeastcombinatoricsnetwork/home.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.