New Trends in Graph Coloring (16w5120)

The Banff International Research Station will host the "New Trends in Graph Coloring" workshop from October 16th to October 21st, 2016.

Graph coloring is one of the oldest studied topics in graph theory. Its roots
date back to 1852 with the first statement of the celebrated Four Color
Conjecture: can the countries of any map on a globe be colored with at most
four colors so that no two countries that share a common boundary have the same
color? It took over 100 years to prove this conjecture, and the attempts to do
so gave rise to many other important concepts in graph theory and motivated the
study of graph colorings in greater generality. Further motivation for the
concept comes from wide-ranging applications of many variants of graph coloring
in algorithm design, scheduling and resource allocation.

For these reasons, the study of graph colorings is a very active research
subject with many interesting open questions. While many of these questions are
notoriously difficult, a plethora of new and innovative methods have been
developed in graph coloring over the last decade. These developments in turn
have led to the resolution of many open questions and conjectures in the field.
This workshop brings together the originators of these new methods, as well as
other respected researchers and bright young minds in graph coloring, to
explore these new breakthroughs in the hope of extending these burgeoning works
beyond their original scope to novel areas of application.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT)..