Preface

Summary

The British Combinatorial Committee invited nine distinguished combinatorial mathematicians to give survey talks on the latest developments in their own fields at the 19th British Combinatorial Conference held at the University of Wales, Bangor, in July 2003. This volume contains the survey articles on which these talks were based, together with a memoir of Bill Tutte.

The conference was held in Bangor to honour the 100th anniversary of the birth of Professor D.E. Littlewood, Professor of Mathematics at Bangor from 1948 to 1970. The talk by Arun Ram, which dealt with recent developments in generalized Hall–Littlewood and Kostka–Foulkes polynomials, was designated the Littlewood Anniversary Lecture.

The customary Rado Lecture, this year given by Imre Leader, described recent developments in Ramsey Theory for infinite systems. The nine articles in this volume provide a splendid source of reference to the current state of the art in combinatorics.

In coordinating this volume I have been greatly assisted by previous local organisers, by members of the British Combinatorial Committee, and by Jonathan Walthoe of Cambridge University Press. The delivery on schedule of this volume was made possible by the careful attention to detail, and by the prompt response to requests, of all the authors and referees.

The conference is grateful for financial support from the London Mathematical Society.