Yousef Alavi to be remembered during math symposium

Contact: Jeanne Baron
Photo of the late Dr. Yousef .

Alavi

KALAMAZOO—The late Dr. Yousef Alavi, Western Michigan University professor emeritus of mathematics, will be remembered during the Department of Mathematics' 2013 Emeriti Day celebration Thursday and Friday, Oct. 24-25.

The Yousef Alavi Memorial Symposium will focus on technical mathematics but is free and open to the public. Registrations are requested at wmich.edu/math and may be made for both days, Thursday only or Friday only.

Emeriti Day has been expanded to a two-day symposium in memory of Alavi, who died in May and directed the International Graph Theory Conference held at WMU every four years from 1968 to 2000. Personal reminiscences of Alavi will be shared during a by-invitation-only emeriti dinner.

During the symposium, WMU also will acknowledge the 100th birthday of the late Dr. Paul Erdös, a well-known Hungarian mathematician who delivered numerous colloquia at the University and collaborated with mathematics department faculty and graduate students for some 20 years.

Symposium schedule of events

The symposium's public events begin at 2:25 p.m. Thursday on the sixth floor of Everett Tower in the Alavi Commons Room. First up will be talks on "Independence Sequences in a Graph, Constrained and Unconstrained" and "Eulerian Graphs and a Cycle Decomposition Conjecture."

The day will end with a colloquium by Dr. Fan Chung from the University of California, San Diego. Chung will speak on "Some Problems and Results in Spectral Graph Theory" from 4 to 5 p.m.

Friday's talks begin at 10:20 a.m. and are titled "Long Cycles in Graphs," "On Paul Erdös's Not-So-Random Graph," "Minimum Degree and Disjoint Cycles in Generalized Claw-free Graphs," "Take Two," and "The Hunt for the Dreaded Chorded Cycle."

A concluding colloquium will take place from 4 to 5 p.m. in the Fetzer Center's Putney Auditorium. It features Dr. Ronald Graham, also from the University of California, San Diego, speaking on "The Combinatorics of Solving Linear Equations."