Traces of the Latin American Conference on Combinatorics, Graphs and Applications: A selection of papers from LACGA 2004, Santiago, Chile

Abstract

The present issue comprises papers presented at the Latin American Conference on Combinatorics, Graphs and Applications LACGA, held August 2004 in Santiago, Chile. That conference gathered scientists from Latin America, Europe and the US sharing their interest in modern aspects of discrete applied mathematics, its ramifications and applications. Its venue and size, its subject diversity, and last not least, the particularly pleasant working environment made the meeting into an extremely fertile interaction forum between participants, be they well established researchers or young students. In between stimulating presentations, many informal exchanges took place, novel ideas took shape and new projects and partnerships were started. Many exciting new results e.g. in extremal and polyhedral combinatorics, optimization over graphs and applications were presented. This is well documented by the collection of papers presented in rhis issue and we are grateful to the Editor in Chief of DAM for having agreed to host it in this Journal. We thank all the anonymous referees for their careful, competent and diligent reviewing of the submitted papers. We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Millennium Science Nuclei “Complex Engineering Systems” and “Information and Randomness” in Chile as well as the Departments of Industrial Engineering and Mathematical Engineering, and the Center of Mathematical Modeling of the Universidad de Chile, that also hosted the meeting. Here is a quick overview of the papers, classified into the categories: Graph Theory and Combinatorics, Combinatorial Optimization and Polyhedral Combinatorics, and Applications. Finally we would like to thank Marianne Ruegg for her competent support in preparing this issue.