Conference: Binghamton University Graduate Combinatorics, Algebra, and Topology Conference (BUGCAT Conference) 2024,2025,2026

This award supports the BUGCAT Conference (Binghamton University Graduate Combinatorics, Algebra, and Topology Conference) 2024 which will take place at the Binghamton University campus on October 26-27, 2024 and also tosupport the conference in the fall of 2025 and 2026. This conference has been running since 2008, with support from NSF in many years, including the last three in-person conferences, in 2019, 2022, and 2023.

Continuing NSF support will allow to keep the conference at a current level of more than 100 registered participants, three hour-long keynote presentations, and 40-45 contributed talks of 20-25 minutes in length. The three keynote speakers are professional mathematicians, while most of the other participants are graduate students, with some postdocs and undergraduates.

The conference is run by a rotating committee of graduate students, with general oversight and guidance from the P.I. and some other faculty members. This helps to maintain a friendly and inclusive atmosphere, to facilitate free scientific interactions at the level appropriate for the beginning researchers at various stages of their mathematical development.

This also gives the graduate student organizers experience in running a larger conference, and helps them appreciate what is involved in this, when they go give talks at conferences elsewhere. The organizers make efforts to encourage diversity, both by virtue of the varied backgrounds of the organizing committee members, and by the selection of the keynote speakers, without sacrificing the scientific level of the conference.

The permanent conference website with the 2023 information, and some previous years' documents, can be found here: https://seminars.math.binghamton.edu/BUGCAT/index.html

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.