ALTERNATING SIGN MATRICES

A Conference in Honor of David P. Robbins

June 29-30, 2003


Location: About a hundred mathematicians joined us at the IDA Center for Communications Research in Princeton, where Dave Robbins has worked for 23 years. Our new building is at 805 Bunn Drive in Princeton, NJ. The closest airports are Newark and Philadelphia, each about an hour from Princeton. To get to CCR-P from US 1 near Princeton, take Harrison Street north. One mile after the intersection with Nassau Street in downtown Princeton, fork slightly right onto Bunn Drive. After three quarters of a mile, turn right into CCR-P. The conference opened on Sunday at 10:45 am and closed on Monday at noon.

Talks: The speakers pitched their talks to mathematicians who are not experts on alternating sign matrices. For an introduction to alternating sign matrices, take a look at Dave Robbins's 1991 paper in the Mathematical Intelligencer, "The story of 1, 2, 7, 42, 429, 7436, ...", or David Bressoud's 1999 paper with Jim Propp in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, "How the Alternating Sign Matrix Conjecture Was Solved". The titles below are linked to the speakers' abstracts. The conference program lists the day and time each talk was presented. It also lists colleagues and friends of Dave Robbins who made remarks at the conference, including Alan Richter, David Lieberman, and Lee Neuwirth. We all enjoyed reading the article on Dave Robbins that appeared in the Princeton Packet on June 27, 2003.

Dinner: Sixty four people (conference participants and family members) joined Dave and four of the speakers for dinner on Sunday, June 29 at Sunny Garden (15 Farber Road, Princeton NJ).

Publication: Doron Zeilberger has arranged for selected papers contributed by conference participants to be published in a special issue of Advances in Applied Mathematics, with guest editors Bill Mills and Bill Doran. The papers submitted for inclusion in the special issue, dedicated to Dave Robbins, will be refereed. Please email your contribution to Bill Doran by September 1, 2003.

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This page is maintained by lbutler@haverford.edu. It was last updated 7/8/03.