Conference: 11th Lake Michigan Workshop on Combinatorics and Graph Theory

About This Grant

The 11th Lake Michigan Workshop on Combinatorics and Graph Theory will be held at the University of Notre Dame on May 2-3 2026. The workshop will benefit graduate students and junior researchers in multiple subfields of discrete mathematics, working at institutions in the Great Lakes area and beyond. The workshop is built around three sets of two tutorial lectures, focusing on state-of-the-art techniques and results on which the speakers are particularly qualified to expound. There will also be short talks by students and early-career researchers. There will be ample unscheduled time during the weekend, allowing new research collaborations to commence and active collaborations to be continued. Junior participants will establish valuable connections with more senior colleagues and receive guidance from them in a relaxed and informal environment. 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, probability theory, and computer science. The tutorial speakers for the 2026 workshop are confirmed to be Igor Pak (University of California, Los Angeles), Lutz Warnke (University of California, San Diego), and Fan Wei (Duke University). The tutorial speakers were selected with the goal of representing disparate subfields of combinatorics and graph theory, with Pak as an expert in algebraic combinatorics, Warnke an expert in probabilistic combinatorics, and Wei an expert in extremal combinatorics. The website for the workshop is https://sites.nd.edu/lmcgt/. 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.