This week I was at the Postgraduate Combinatorial Conference, which was held in Queen Mary, University of London.
It was one of the liveliest PCCs I have been to, with about 35 delegates from all over England, Scotland, and further afield (Reykjavik, Wien). Several of my St Andrews students from last year were there, all doing well. I didn’t attend many of the student talks – I regard them as the students’ affairs and I don’t want to sit in the back looking intimidating – but I had talks about mathematics (and other things) with quite a few delegates.
I did go to Julia Wolf’s talk, in which she predicted that Sidorenko’s conjecture (stating, roughly, that for any bipartite graph H, the number of copies of H in a large graph G is at least as great as in the random graph with the same edge density as G) will be resolved soon, one way or the other.
The weather was lovely – I did go for a walk in the park at one point – and the College catering had done a superb job, with good lunches and dinners and cakes at coffee time.
I gave a talk (you can find the slides in the usual place), and put in a couple of plugs: for Jack Edmonds’ lectures, and for my talk at the Permutation Patterns conference, both taking place in June.
