New term, time to revise and update web pages.
I have links on my web page to various GAP programs; I found that many of them were broken. These are now fixed.
Well over 10 years ago, Robin Wilson asked me to write a concluding chapter for a book on the history of combinatorics that he was editing. The project languished for a long time, but he has just told me that it has been revived, and so I have updated my chapter here. Regular readers of this blog will recognise some of the things I go on about!
Nice article.
Even though I’ve been in the game less time than you, the respect accorded to combinatorics has increased noticeably even since I started out. I think that because many combinatorial problems are so easily stated (if not solved) that it is very easy for them to be dismissed by researchers in subjects of such technicality that you need a decade of study merely in order to be able to understand the STATEMENT of the problem, let alone tackle it.
Your article mentions a few of the factors – in particular, the central role of combinatorial problems in computational complexity and the development of really deep structural theory by Robertson and Seymour.
But I also credit another factor – a vastly increased focus on the concept of an abstract network, driven by the study of real networks in particular the Internet and social networks, and popularised by the “small world” craze of a few years ago (which of course includes genuine research in addition to pop-science).