Bled’11
This issue of Ars Mathematica Contemporanea contains a selection of articles presented at
the 7th Slovenian Graph Theory Conference (Bled’11), held from June 19 to June 25, 2011,
by tradition at Lake Bled, Slovenia. This conference (held every four years) has progressed
a long way since the first one in 1991. The number of participants has grown, from just 30
in 1991, to 270 at Bled’11, representing 40 countries and all six continents. The Bled’11
conference was attended by some of the leading researchers in graph theory, as well as
many postdocs and talented PhD students. There were nine keynote speakers (Jonathan
L. Gross, Wilfried Imrich, Alexander A. Ivanov, László Lovász, Jaroslav Nešetřil, Egon
Schulte, Tamás Szőnyi, Martin Škoviera, and Asia Ivić Weiss), plus 213 contributed talks
presented within 16 minisymposia, and a general session. The minisymposia brought to-
gether researchers from specific fields, ranging across algebraic, algorithmic, geometric,
topological, and other aspects of graph theory, and enabled them to present their work and
exchange ideas. We know that this led to progress on many open problems, and catalysed
many new collaborations. The algebraic minisymposia were dedicated to Henry H. Glover,
a very dear and strong collaborator of the Slovenian Algebraic Graph Theory group, who
sadly passed away just a few weeks before the conference.
Many special and satellite events were organised during and after the conference. We
celebrated the 70th birthdays of Jonathan L. Gross and Wilfried Imrich. A meeting of the
International Academy of Mathematical Chemistry was held, as well as the first meeting of
the team from the ESF EuroGiGA GReGAS research project, led by Tomaž Pisanski (Uni-
versity of Primorska). Another highlight was the ‘Milestones’ exhibition, due to Boštjan
Kuzman, which presented many important steps in the development of graph theory in
Slovenia — from the first lecture notes, scientific results, published papers and doctoral
theses, to international collaborations, celebrated publications, editorial positions, estab-
lishments of new institutions, scientific journals, and further projects. Immediately after
the conference, about 80 participants attended a satellite PhD Summer School — the Al-
gebraic Graph Theory Summer School, held in Rogla, and organised by the University of
Primorska, and some participants attended a ‘Mathematics meets Art’ event in Ljubljana.
In the past, many papers from each Bled conference were published in a special issue
of the Discrete Mathematics journal. In 2007 however, when Ars Mathematica Contempo-
ranea was established, the participants of the 6th Bled conference were given the option
of publishing their contributions in a special issue of this new journal. The organisers of
the 2011 conference decided that the contributions related to Bled’11 would be published
exclusively by Ars Mathematica Contemporanea. This is the first such special issue, and
contains 15 articles, accepted for publication after a thorough refereeing process. In pro-
ducing it, we are able to present to the readers of this journal a selected number of the
Bled’11 conference contributions, containing high quality results, and establishing starting
points for future research. More of these will be published in another special issue in 2014.
Klavdija Kutnar and Primož Šparl
Guest Editors
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