All kinds of mathematics …

Please reserve the dates 24-27 July 2017 in your diary!

Next year, I will turn 70. Some good friends (notably João Araújo) are arranging a conference in Lisbon to mark the occasion, and many other good friends have agreed to come to speak.

The list of speakers, not yet complete, already includes R. A. Bailey, W. Bentz, R. Calderbank, P. J. Cameron, G. Cherlin, P. Diaconis, C. Freer, M. Giudici, R. Gray, A. Hulpke, M. Kinyon, D. Leemans, H. Leitão, D. Macpherson, A. Malheiro, F. Matucci, J. Meakin, J. D. Mitchell, P. M. Neumann, J. Nešetřil, P. P. Pálfy, C. E. Praeger, C. M. Roney-Dougal, B. Steinberg, P. Silva, L. H. Soicher, P. Spiga, E. Szemerédi, and M. Volkov. All are my colleagues, co-authors, teachers, students, fellow-students, or people I have talked about on this blog. What a line-up!

It looks to me that this will be the event of the year 2017. Add to this the fact that Lisbon is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and you really can’t afford to miss it!

The webpage is here. Bookmark it, and be sure to come. I look forward to seeing you.

I don’t know how to begin to thank the organisers and the speakers at this event, so I won’t even try now. But they can be assured that I feel deeply touched and grateful.

The full title of the conference is “All kinds of mathematics remind me of you”, subtitled “Gathering excellence where Cameron excels: Combinatorics, Groups, Model Theory, Number Theory, Semigroups, Statistics, and more …”.

If you are close to my age, the title of the conference might remind you of something. In 1970, at around the time I was born (in the sense that Paul Erdős used the word), a lass from Derry called Dana Rosemary Scallon won the Eurovision Song Contest with a song called “All kinds of everything remind me of you”; she was the first of a considerable number of Irish winners of this competition.

As you can see from the list of speakers, the variety of mathematics in Lisbon in July will not be inferior to the variety of things that Dana found evocative of the subject of her song.

You have put the dates in your diary, haven’t you? and bookmarked the web page?

For friends on other continents, there is a good selection of conferences in Europe in summer 2017 that might tempt you to spend more than a week here (and, despite what you may have heard, Britain is still part of Europe):

• Arithmetic of function fields, Münster, Germany, 25-30 June 2017
• Second Malta Conference in Graph Theory and Combinatorics (2MCGTC 2017) (in honour of the 75th birthday of Stanley Fiorini), Qawra, St. Paul’s Bay, Malta, 26-30 June 2017
• 26th British Combinatorial Conference, Strathclyde (Glasgow), UK, 3-7 July 2017
• FPSAC2017 (Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics), London, UK, 9-14 July 2017
• FoCM 2017 (Foundations of Computational Mathematics, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, 10-19 July 2017
• Logica 2017, Hejnice, Czech Republic, 19-23 June 2017
• GEMS 2017 (Graph Embeddings and Maps on Surfaces), Podbanské, Slovakia, 30 July – 4 August 2017
• Groups St Andrews 2017, Birmingham, UK, 5-13 August 2017