OpenDreamKit participants: Nicolas M. Thi'ery, Katja Ber\v{c}i\v{c}, Viviane Pons.
Event summary
FPSAC – Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics – is the major yearly international conference on Algebraic; topics of presentations covered all aspects of combinatorics and their relations with other parts of mathematics, physics, computer science, and biology. This year’s edition took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, from July 1st to 5th. About 250 mathematicians attended the event. One fourth of them also attended the computational workshop Sage Days 105 organized on the following week by OpenDreamKit.
OpenDreamKit implication
N Thiéry is member of the permanent committee of the conference since three years and has been leading an effort to increase the strength of software demonstrations, as a way to advertise and give back credit to the software development efforts of its members. Indeed, this mathematical community has a long tradition of using computer experimentation which plays a fundamental role in the research. N. Thiéry chaired the software demonstration sessions which held a record of six presentations, instead of a handful for the previous years combined.
One presentation was delivered by K. Ber\v{c}i\v{c}, and presented an early version of a website generator for mathematical databases, an integral component of the \textsf{data.math-hub.info} system prototype (reported on in D6.10). All the materials for K. Ber\v{c}i\v{c}’s software demonstration are available online:
- slides http://fpsac2019.fmf.uni-lj.si/resources/Slides/202slides.pdf and
- extended abstract http://fpsac2019.fmf.uni-lj.si/resources/Proceedings/202.pdf
OpenDreamKit funded the participation of Nicolas M. Thiéry, K. Ber\v{c}i\v{c} to the event (about 1100 Euro). Coordinated efforts were undertaken with the FPSAC organizers to encourage joint participation to both events and optimize the funds used on both sides for supporting young researchers.
Results and impact
The software demonstrations were well received by the attendees. More than one half of them were present at the session, and a quick poll showed that most of them were using computer experimentation on a regular basis, while a large fraction was often writing code for their research.
All of the presentations used OpenDreamKit components, and all the demonstrations about computational software used Sage and were made available online using the Binder service, with links from the schedule.
There was a notable interest for the \textsf{data.math-hub.info} system prototype, which confirmed that there is a real need for such infrastructure in the combinatorics community.
International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics, Ljubljana, Slovenia