Conferences in Ottawa

Association Schemes and Applications, CanaDAM 2025

The Canadian Discrete and Algorithmic Mathematics (CanaDAM 2025) Conference took place last week (May 20 to May 23) at the University of Ottawa. Apart from the weather, the conference was amazing and the plenary talks were excellent. I particularly enjoyed Sam Mattheus’ talk on ‘‘Avoiding subgraphs: randomly or deterministically?’’.

Mitra Maleki and I also organized a mini-symposium on Association Schemes and Applications at CanaDAM 2025. From Tuesday to Thursday, we had 12 amazing speakers who talked about their recent research on topics in the theory of association schemes such as Jordan algebras, Terwilliger algebras, \(T\)-designs, and distance-regular graphs, as well as some applications such as discrete-time quantum walks on graphs and Erdős-Ko-Rado type theorems.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Paul Terwilliger and Nathan Lindzey presented open problems that will hopefully lead to collaborations among the participants.

From left to right: Robert Bailey, Mitra Maleki, Bill Martin, Shuxing Li, Allen Herman, Chris Godsil, me, Nathan Lindzey, Paul Terwilliger, Lukas Klawuhn, Harmony Zhan

Ontario Combinatorics Workshop

Ada Chan, Bobby Miraftab and I were also in charge of organizing the 28th Ontario Combinatorics Workshop (OCW) which took place in Ottawa at Carleton University. The plenary talks were given by Jane Breen, Daniel Panario and Mateja Šajna. In addition, there were 21 contributed talks and 87 registered participants in total.

Group photo