9th Workshop on the Matthews-Sumner Conjecture and Related Problems

Location and schedule

The workshop will take place on April 9-14, 2017 in Pilsen. The workshop starts with dinner on Sunday, April 9, 2017, and ends with breakfast on Friday, April 14, 2017. The venue of the workshop is the comfortable Hotel Trend in the downtown of Pilsen yet in a relatively quiet street (the same place as last time in 2015).

Programme

Breakfast is served each day between 7:30 and 9:00.

About the workshop

The upcoming event is the ninth in a series of workshops focused on the Matthews-Sumner Conjecture and related topics. The previous workshops took place in Nečtiny (1999 and 2000), Hannover (2002), Hájek (2003), Domažlice (2008, 2011 and 2013) and Pilsen (2015). The Matthews-Sumner Conjecture is interrelated with several other open problems in Graph Theory. For instance, some of the known equivalent formulations of this conjecture are the following:

• Every 4-connected claw-free graph is hamiltonian. (Matthews, Sumner 1984)
• Every 4-connected line graph is hamiltonian. (Thomassen 1984)
• Every cyclically 4-edge-connected cubic graph has either a 3-edge-colouring or a dominating cycle. (Fleischner 1984)
• Every cyclically 4-edge-connected cubic graph has a dominating cycle. (Ash and Jackson 1989)

The topics of interest for the workshop include the following:

• hamiltonian properties of line graphs and claw-free graphs,
• uniquely hamiltonian graphs,
• forbidden induced subgraphs,
• closure operations, contractibility, collapsibility,
• graph toughness,
• cubic graphs, snarks,
• nowhere-zero flows and cycle covers.

As usual, there will be talks presenting new progress in the field, and we would like to keep enough time for individual discussions and working in small groups.

Participants

In addition to the speakers above, other participants include Herbert Fleischner (co-chair of the organising committee), Jiří Fiala, Evelyne Flandrin, Shinya Fujita, Daniël Paulusma, Nico Van Cleemput and Jordan Venters, as well as further colleagues from the Pilsen group (Roman Čada, Honza Ekstein, Přemek Holub, Adam Kabela, Tomáš Kaiser, Martina Mockovčiaková and Jakub Teska).

Travel information

Pilsen is located near the D5 motorway from Prague to Germany. Connections by public transport between Prague and Pilsen are frequent and convenient. To check for public transport connections, use this page (it has English and German versions). If you need assistance, please ask the organisers.

When coming from Prague airport, there are two options:

• The simpler one is to take the Airport Express (AE) bus to the main train station (Hlavní nádraží) and take the train to Pilsen from there.
• The faster option is to take the 100 bus to Zličín subway terminal, and then take the yellow RegioJet bus to Pilsen. It is advisable (and in peak times such as Sunday afternoon, absolutely necessary) to make an advance booking for the RegioJet bus.

The AE and the 100 bus run at least twice an hour. When searching for connections using the above page, enter "Praha Terminal 1" (or 2) as the point of departure.

Once in Pilsen, it may be best to take a taxi, although the hotel is just a 10 minute eastward walk away from the bus station (see the map).

Organisers and contact

The organising committee is chaired by Herbert Fleischner and Zdeněk Ryjáček. For additional information about the workshop, please contact Přemek Holub, Tomáš Kaiser or Edita Rollová.

The event is co-organised by the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, and the Pilsen branch of the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science (CE-ITI), with the support of the Pilsen branch of the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists.