# Graphs, groups, and more: celebrating Brian Alspach’s 80th and Dragan Marušič’s 65th birthdays

28 May 2018 to 1 June 2018
Koper
UTC timezone

## Stanton Medal Award Ceremony

"Stanton Medal" is one of the four medals annually awarded by the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (ICA). The other medals are: the Euler Medal recognizing distinguished lifetime career contributions to combinatorial research by Fellows of the ICA who are still active in research; the Hall Medals recognizing extensive quality research with substantial international impact by Fellows of the ICA in mid-career; the Kirkman Medals recognizing excellent research by Fellow s or Associate Fellows of the ICA early in their research career, as evidenced by an excellent body of published research. Specifically, Stanton Medals, instituted in 2016, honour significant lifetime contributions to promoting the discipline of combinatorics through advocacy, outreach, service, teaching and/or mentoring. Letters of nomination should establish the significance, duration, and impact of the nominees contributions other than research. At most one medal per year is to be awarded, typically to a Fellow of the ICA.

The ceremony will be held within the conference on Tuesday, May 29 at 11:00, followed by the talk of the 2018 Stanton Medal Awardee, Robin Wilson.

## A few words about the 2018 Stanton Medal Awardee, Robin Wilson (from the letter of his nominators Gary Chartrand and Arthur T. White)

For some 37 years, Robin Wilson taught mathematics at the Open University in the United Kingdom. While there, he presented correspondence material for adults studying at home and presenting many television and radio programs for the British Broadcasting Company. He chaired the curse teams for two combinatorics courses on Graphs, Networks and Design', producing books, TV and radio programs, DVDs, audiotapes and software. These courses have been studied over 35 years by more than 10,000 adult students.

Robin Wilson have given some 1500 talks and lectures over 45 years to a wide range of audiences, many of which have been for schoolchildren, student groups or the deneral public, Many of these talks have been on combinatorics and graph theory.

Robin Wilson gave a number of lectures on combinatorics at Gresham College, London, where he held a Professorship of Mathematics. These are available on the Gresham website and on YouTube. One of these on graph theory has had some 30,000 views.

Robin Wilson has given several MAA plenary lectures at the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings held every January in the USA. His lecture on the Four Color Problem had an audience of 1,400 (a record audience at that time). In 1978 Robin WIlson appeared on the BBC morning radio show Today, where he spoke to 5 million people about the Four Color Problem.

In addition to the numerous talks and lectures Robin Wilson has given promoting combinatorics and graph theory, he has also written a great deal about these same subjects. Indeed, he has been an author or editor of some forty books, more than half of which have dealt with combinatorics and graph theory. He is the author of the 1972 textbook Introduction to Graph Theory', one of the early books on graph theory for undergraduates. He is the author of the popular book Four Colors Suffice' on the Four Color Problem, published by Princeton University Press and written for a more general public.

Robin Wilson is a co-editor of the book Graph Theory 1736 - 1936', discussing the first 200 years of graph theory. He is also co-editor of Combinatorics: Ancient & Modern', the only book on the history of combinatorics. He is also co-editor of the 2016 book Combinatorics: A Very Short Introduction'. With Lowell Beineke, he co-edited a series of books on Topics in Graph Theory', dealing with a wide range of topics in graph theory for researchers in graph theory.

In 2017 Robin Wilson was giving a minicourse The history of combinatorics' within the 7th Summer School in Discrete Mathematics organized by the University of Primorska.