Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many applications ranging from logic to statistical physics and from evolutionary biology to computer science.
William Thomas TutteOC FRS FRSC was an English and Canadian codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system which was used for top-secret communications within the Wehrmacht High Command. The high-level, strategic nature of the intelligence obtained from Tutte's crucial breakthrough, in the bulk decrypting of Lorenz-enciphered messages specifically, contributed greatly, and perhaps even decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany. He also had a number of significant mathematical accomplishments, including foundation work in the fields of graph theory and matroid theory.
Jack R. Edmonds is an American-born and educated computer scientist and mathematician who lived and worked in Canada for much of his life. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, discrete mathematics and the theory of computing. He was the recipient of the 1985 John von Neumann Theory Prize.
Jaroslav (Jarik) Nešetřil is a Czech mathematician, working at Charles University in Prague. His research areas include combinatorics, graph theory, algebra, posets, computer science.
Jeffrey Howard Dinitz is an American mathematician who taught combinatorics at the University of Vermont. He is best known for proposing the Dinitz conjecture, which became a major theorem.
Carsten Thomassen is a Danish mathematician. He has been a Professor of Mathematics at the Technical University of Denmark since 1981, and since 1990 a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. His research concerns discrete mathematics and more specifically graph theory.
In mathematics, a conference matrix (also called a C-matrix) is a square matrix C with 0 on the diagonal and +1 and −1 off the diagonal, such that CTC is a multiple of the identity matrix I. Thus, if the matrix has order n, CTC = (n−1)I. Some authors use a more general definition, which requires there to be a single 0 in each row and column but not necessarily on the diagonal.
Václav (Vašek) Chvátal is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and a Visiting Professor at Charles University in Prague. He has published extensively on topics in graph theory, combinatorics, and combinatorial optimization.
William Lawrence Kocay is a Canadian professor at the department of computer science at St. Paul's College of the University of Manitoba and a graph theorist. He is known for his work in graph algorithms and the reconstruction conjecture and is affectionately referred to as "Wild Bill" by his students. Bill Kocay is a former managing editor of Ars Combinatoria, a Canadian journal of combinatorial mathematics, is a founding fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.
Ronald Cedric Read was a British mathematician, latterly a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He published many books and papers, primarily on enumeration of graphs, graph isomorphism, chromatic polynomials, and particularly, the use of computers in graph-theoretical research. A majority of his later work was done in Waterloo. Read received his Ph.D. (1959) in graph theory from the University of London.
Herbert John Ryser was a professor of mathematics, widely regarded as one of the major figures in combinatorics in the 20th century. He is the namesake of the Bruck–Ryser–Chowla theorem, Ryser's formula for the computation of the permanent of a matrix, and Ryser's conjecture.
John Adrian Bondy is a retired English mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics and graph theory.
Uppaluri Siva Ramachandra Murty, or U. S. R. Murty, is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo.
Nicholas Charles Wormald is an Australian mathematician and professor of mathematics at Monash University. He specializes in probabilistic combinatorics, graph theory, graph algorithms, Steiner trees, web graphs, mine optimization, and other areas in combinatorics.
Ian Murray Wanless is a professor in the School of Mathematics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His research area is combinatorics, principally Latin squares, graph theory and matrix permanents.
Ebadollah S. Mahmoodian is a retired professor of mathematics at the Mathematical Sciences Department of Sharif University of Technology.
Ralph Gordon Stanton was a Canadian mathematician, teacher, scholar, and pioneer in mathematics and computing education. As a researcher, he made important contributions in the area of discrete mathematics; and as an educator and administrator, was also instrumental in founding the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and for establishing its unofficial mascot of the pink tie.
Wendy Joanne Myrvold is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist known for her work on graph algorithms, planarity testing, and algorithms in enumerative combinatorics. She is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Victoria.
Mohamed Omar is a mathematician interested in combinatorics, and algebra. Omar is currently an Associate Professor of Mathematics and the Joseph B. Platt Chair in Effective Teaching at Harvey Mudd College.
Kristina L. Vušković is a Serbian mathematician and theoretical computer scientist working in graph theory. She is Professor in Algorithms and Combinatorics in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds, and a professor of computer science at Union University (Serbia).
