Keynote speaker

András Recski,
Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

Applications of Combinatorics in Statics

Civil engineers use graph theoretic methods for studying the rigidity properties of bar and joint frameworks since the middle of the 19th century. Many new results were obtained in the last 30 years, also leading to interesting new consequences in graph theory and combinatorial optimization, however, some very basic questions are still unsolved.

The talk surveys such results and open problems with many illustrative examples. No preliminaries from physics or engineering is required -- some elementary graph theory is an advantage but not a must.