A History of the Combinatorial Potlatches

Brian Alspach, Robert A. Beezer

This is a brief history of the Combinatorial Potlatches and their speakers. It was maintained by Brian Alspach (BA) through November 2001, then by Robert Beezer (RAB). Send additions, clarifications and corrections to beezer@ups.edu.

1. Combinatorial Potlatch One, 27 February 1982, University of Washington
   Branko Grünbaum Edge-transitive planar graphs
   C. C. Lindner How to embed a partial Steiner triple system

2. Combinatorial Potlatch Two, 27 November 1982, Simon Fraser University
   Bill Kantor Algorithms for graph isomorphism and other group theoretic problems
   Peter Kleinschmidt Properties of simplicial complexes and Hilbert functions

3. Combinatorial Potlatch Three (BA)
   I have no record, but I believe this was our first visit to Western Washington University.

4. Combinatorial Potlatch Four, 19 November 1983, University of Washington
   Geoffrey Shephard The theory of fabrics
   Richard Weiss Some aspects of graph theory in the classification of finite simple groups

5. Combinatorial Potlatch Five, 19 May 1984, Simon Fraser University
   Richard Weiss Some aspects of graph theory in the classification of finite simple groups
   Egan Schulte A combinatorial theory of regular polytopes

BA: At this point we have lost track of the numerical sequence, but perhaps we can reconstruct the other meetings.

1. 1 December 1984, Western Washington University
   Peter Cameron Random sum-free sets and cyclic automorphisms
   Tudor Zamfirescu Most stars are thin, most thick stars are not smooth

2. 14 December 1985, University of Washington
   Richard Nowakowski Pursuit and search games on graphs
   Brian Alspach Orthogonal factorizations of graphs

3. 5 April 1986, Western Washington University
   Moshe Rosenfeld, Data allocation problem: Or how to divide a square into rectangles
   Dave Kirkpatrick Algorithms for finding maximal vectors

4. 13 December 1986, University of British Columbia
   Bojan Mohar Embeddings of infinite graphs
   Peter Gritzman Finite packing and covering

5. 9 May 1987, Pacific Lutheran University
   Stan Wagon Fourteen different (?) proofs of a result about tiling a rectangle
   Don Chakerian How to fit an elephant into a small cube

6. 28 November 1987, Simon Fraser University
   J.-C. Bermond DeBruijn-Kautz networks
   H. S. Wilf The exponential formula: Combinatorics' best kept secret

7. 9 December 1989, University of Washington
   Joan P. Hutchinson When does a graph contain a spanning tree with no vertex of degree 2? (And why would you want to know this?)
   Charles J. Colburn Intersections and supports of designs

8. 25 January 1992, University of Puget Sound
   Jason Rush Very dense packings of spheres and other shapes in Euclidean n-space
   J. Nesetril Dimension and boolean dimension

9. 11 February 1995, Simon Fraser University
   Mike Fellows Coping with intractability: The parametric point of view
   Anna Karlin Randomized and multipointer paging with locality of reference

10. 24 May 1997, Simon Fraser University (Harbour Centre)
    Gary MacGillivray The achromatic number of graphs
    Kathie Cameron Disjoint monotone paths in simple regions: Existence, uniqueness, min-max relations, algorithms and applications
    Peter Hamburger A graph-theoretic approach to problems in elementary and combinatorial geometry

BA: You will note that Richard Weiss is listed as giving the same talk at two consecutive potlatches. I vaguely recall that Richard had to cancel his appearance for the first of the two listed so that I think the later listing is correct. I undoubtedly have an early announcement in my files. It is certainly the case that he talked only once.