NSF Award
2435236
The 3rd KOI Combinatorics Lectures will be held October 4-5, 2024 at Indiana University. This regional conference is organized by members of the combinatorics community from the Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana (KOI) area. It seeks to rebuild and initiate research connections among the KOI area graduate students, postdocs and faculty, including individuals from over thirty nearby small colleges, regional universities and ethnically diverse colleges. The conference program consists of four talks from emerging and established researchers in combinatorics broadly defined, a problem session, and a poster session that is open to all participants. In Japanese culture, koi symbolize strength, courage, patience and success through perseverance. All of the conference activities serve to strengthen these attributes among the participants, with a strong focus on increasing the numbers of underrepresented groups in the mathematical sciences, including women. The follow-up yearly conferences will continue at the University of Kentucky in 2025 and the Ohio State University in 2026.<br/><br/><br/>The KOI Combinatorics Lectures showcase national and internationally recognized researchers in combinatorics. New developments in combinatorics and its interactions with other mathematical fields including algebraic geometry, algebra, topology, and artificial intelligence, will be featured. Interactions among all of the participants and the speakers, as well as learning the latest progress and techniques in the field of combinatorics, have the potential to contribute to the growing connections between combinatorics and other scientific areas, including physics, computer science and biology. The vertical mentoring, inclusion of educational activities, and recruitment of speakers and participants from a broad range of institutions and backgrounds contribute to the engagement, retention and equity goals of the NSF. Further details about the conference may be found on the website https://sites.google.com/view/koicombinatorics/<br/><br/>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.
