Conference: 8th Lake Michigan Workshop on Combinatorics and Graph Theory

The 8th Lake Michigan Workshop on Combinatorics and Graph Theory will be hosted by the Department of Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame on May 13--14 2023 (Saturday--Sunday). This annual workshop is targeted towards researchers in discrete mathematics at institutions in the Great Lakes area. The workshop will be centered around two series of three tutorial lectures each, focusing on state-of-the-art techniques in combinatorics and graph theory. There will be closely related short talks by students and early-career researchers, and a problem session. There will be ample unscheduled time during the workshop to allow new research collaborations to commence and active collaborations to be continued. The workshop will particularly benefit undergraduates, graduate students, and early-career researchers by introducing them to new research directions and helping them establish valuable connections with more senior colleagues. Combinatorics and Graph Theory are two very active areas of research within the broader field of Discrete Mathematics, with important ties to disciplines such as statistical physics and algebra. The confirmed tutorial speakers, Will Perkins (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Stephanie van Willigenburg (University of British Columbia), will speak about some of their own recent breakthroughs in these areas. Perkins will speak about the interactions between combinatorics, statistical physics and theoretical computer science, while van Willigenberg will speak about the classical topics of the chromatic polynomial and symmetric functions, and then about a recent notion, the chromatic symmetric function, that unites these ideas from graph theory and algebra. For more information please consult the workshop website, https://sites.nd.edu/lmw8-2023/ 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.