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Institute of Combinatorics

About the Institute of Combinatorics

The combinatorics and graph theory group at the University of Memphis has been a unique, highly productive and active research unit since the early 1970s when the group began a collaborative relationship with Paul Erdős. This collaboration spanned two decades and resulted in the seminal members becoming some of his most frequent coauthors. The momentum continued with the establishment in 1995 of the Jabie Hardin Chair of Excellence in Graph Theory and Combinatorics, together with a rotating visiting senior faculty position. This has lead to an extremely effective group, both in research and in the mentoring of the next generation of students for academic and industry research opportunities in this dynamic field.

The Institute of Combinatorics brings together faculty, visitors, postdocs, students, and staff to provide a world class research group in combinatorics and graph theory.

Contact Information

Tricia SimmonsTricia Simmons, Project Coordinator for Béla Bollobás, the Jabie Hardin Chair of Excellence in Combinatorics
Email: tdsimmns@memphis.edu
Phone: 901.678.5610
Fax: 901.678.4481

The Erdős Lecture Series

The Erdős Lecture Series is a conference held almost every year at the University of Memphis in honor of the department's long relationship with Paul Erdős.

Unfortunately, due to funding difficulties, the 2015 Erdős Lecture Series was cancelled.

Links to posters and websites for previous conferences:

Research Focus

The main areas of focus are extremal and probabilistic combinatorics, general graph theory, applications of linear algebra to graph theory, and additive number theory.

Seminars

The Institute of Combinatorics typically holds seminars on Fridays at 3pm.

Members

Paul BalisterPaul Balister, Former Professor
Research Interests: Probabilistic combinatorics, random geometric graphs

  1. Paul Balister, Béla Bollobás, Robert Morris. The sharp threshold for making squares. Annals of Math. 188 (2018), no. 1, 49–143.
  2. Paul Balister, Béla Bollobás, Robert Morris, Julian Sahasrabudhe, Marius Tiba. The Erdős–Selfridge problem with square-free moduli.
  3. Paul Balister, Béla Bollobás, Robert Morris, Julian Sahasrabudhe, Marius Tiba. Flat Littlewood Polynomials Exist.

 

Bela BollobasBéla Bollobás, Professor; Jabie Hardin Chair of Excellence in Combinatorics
Research Interests: Probabilistic Combinatorics, Graph Theory, Functional analysis

 

David GrynkiewiczDavid Grynkiewicz, Associate Professor
Research Interests: Additive number theory, Extremal combinatorics

  1. Iterated sumsets and setpartitions. To appear in Ramanujan J.
  2. Iterated sumsets and subsequence sums. J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 160 (2018), 136–167.
  3. Planar subsets with small doubling. Q. J. Math. 68 (2017), no. 1, 161–192.

 

Chao LiuChao Liu, Faudree Postdoc
Research Interests: Combinatorial Number Theory, Additive Combinatorics 

 

Vladimir NikiforovVladimir Nikiforov, Professor
Research Interests: Extremal graph theory, applications of linear algebra to graph theory