Graduate Student Combinatorics Conference 2015

Distinguishing Characteristics The GSCC provides a unique and invaluable opportunity for graduate students whose research focuses on combinatorics to experience the benefits of taking part in a research conference. For most conferences that graduate students attend, such as AMS sectional meetings or regional discipline-specific conferences like the Triangle Lectures in Combinatorics, they get the chance to hear influential and informative research talks by some of the most well-known researchers across the country. However, these conferences have very few graduate student speakers, instead consisting of mostly talks given by postdocs and professors. The GSCC, other than the keynote lectures, focuses solely on graduate student talks. Furthermore, with only graduate students, undergraduates, and local professors in attendance, the conference provides a low pressure environment in which they can present their research and improve upon their presentation abilities. Intellectual Merit Combinatorics is a field of mathematics that casts a wide net across many disciplines. It is a vibrant area for new, innovative research that can involve problems and techniques within algebra, geometry, topology, probability, computer science, and even analysis. Combinatorics research has been applied to answer important questions in many areas including biology, economics, and physics. In order to keep this interdisciplinary field as vibrant as it has been in recent decades, it is necessary to have conferences like the GSCC to keep junior investigators aware of the advances that have been made in this lively and exciting field. Broader Impact Additionally, the GSCC provides a great opportunity for graduate students to network by meeting other young mathematicians with similar research topics. These conferences can lead to potential joint research projects and opportunities for collaboration down the road. Even if a graduate student does not attend talks that directly relate to his or her research, hearing research talks in distantly related topics within combinatorics can broaden one’s view of the subject and open one's eyes to exciting new areas that may pique additional interests. Giving their own presentations rather than only hearing talks from senior researchers also allows graduate students to develop their teaching and presentation skills, helping them further succeed as junior researchers.