NSF Award
1703927
The 15th International Conference on Permutation Patterns will be held at Reykjavik University in Iceland, from June 26 to June 30, 2017. The conference will provide a high quality program of speakers in the area of permutation patterns with opportunities for collaboration between junior and senior researchers, as well as between participants from around the world. The conference will feature two plenary one-hour speakers and a number of contributed talks, each of thirty minutes long. Researchers will present their new results and there will be time for open discussions to explore unsolved problems in the field. This award supports travel to the conference by students and early career mathematicians from the United States. This conference is part of a series of annual conferences devoted to the area of permutation patterns. Ever since the first conference in 2003, which was hosted by the University of Otago in New Zealand, it has been held every year at different institutions around the world: in North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia. About 70 participants are anticipated, with about 35-40 contributed talks with no parallel sessions. The conference has been publicized through distribution lists, AMS and other mathematical event calendars, and related conference websites (the conference website is at https://pp2017.github.io/). <br/><br/>The conference will feature current research in the area of permutation patterns and its applications. Major themes in the conference include the structural theory of pattern classes, asymptotic behavior of pattern classes, generalized pattern avoidance, packing densities, and algorithmic and decidability problems. Research in the area is influenced by theoretical computer science, and traces its historical origins to the study of sorting machines. Combinatorial interest in permutation patterns focuses on centrally important enumeration and packing problems, for instance the extremal problem to determine how one pattern can be embedded as often as possible in a permutation. The statistics of permutations also enters into the picture, garnering attention from probabilists. The conference is expected to have a wide impact on a variety of different research areas in mathematics and computer science.
