North British Semigroups and Applications Network

LMS
EMS

NBSAN is a network of researchers in Scotland and Northern England with interests in semigroup theory and its applications. It is funded chiefly by grants from the London Mathematical Society and Edinburgh Mathematical Society, and organises around three meetings per year in different locations around the region. The main participant universities are Heriot-Watt, Manchester, St Andrews and York, but our activities are open to all interested researchers and we especially welcome participation by graduate students.

Next Meeting

The next NBSAN meeting will The next NBSAN meeting will be held at the University of St Andrews on Thursday 19th and Friday 20th May 2011. All talks will be in Theatre B of the Mathematics Institute. A provisional schedule is as follows:

Thursday 19th May

13:30John Fountain (York) - An inverse monoid approach to Thompson's group V and generalisations
14:30Alistair Wallis (Heriot Watt) - Rees monoids, self-similar groups and fractals
15:00Coffee and Proving Theorems
15:30Andrew Duncan (Newcastle) - Rewriting systems and the geodesic problem for words and cycles
16:30Si Craik (St Andrews) - Ends of semigroups
17:00Close

Friday 20th May

09:15Mark Kambites (Manchester) - An Introduction to Tropical Matrix Semigroups
10:15Coffee and Proving Theorems
10:45Alan Cain (Porto) - Hyperbolic and word-hyperbolic semigroups
11:45Lunch
12:45Dave Jones (Heriot Watt) - Graph Inverse Semigroups
13:15Marianne Johnson (Manchester) - Green's J-order and the rank of tropical matrices
14:15Close

There are limited funds available to support the attendance costs of UK-based graduate students; if you are interested in claiming then please contact Mark Kambites in advance with an estimate of your costs. For all other enquiries about the St Andrews meeting please contact James Mitchell.

Future Events

The Autumn NBSAN meetings will provisionally be held in York on 23rd November 2011. Further details will be available here nearer the time.

Other forthcoming (non-NBSAN) conferences which might be of interest include....

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Past Meetings

The seventh NBSAN meeting was held at the University of York on Wednesday 24th November 2010. the speakers were:

Bassima Afara (Heriot-Watt) - The Rees theorem and its generalizations (slides)
Peter Jones (Marquette) - Varieties of P-restriction semigroups (slides)
Volodymyr Mazorchuk (Uppsala) - Kiselman type semigroups
Maria Szendrei (Szeged) - Some results on almost factorisable semigroups (slides)
Alexei Vernitski (Essex) - Graphs to semigroups (slides)

The sixth NBSAN meeting was held at the University of Manchester on Monday 26th July 2010. The speakers were:

Zur Izhakian (Bar Ilan) - Supertropical algebra
Erzsi Dombi (Glasgow) - Automatic semigroup acts
Rick Thomas (Leicester) - FA-presentable semigroups

The fifth NBSAN meeting was held at the University of St Andrews on Friday 7th and Saturday 8th May 2010, organised by James Mitchell. Speakers were:

Andreas Distler (St Andrews) - How to store 10 semigroups in a bit
James East (Sydney) - Generators and relations for monoids of block bijections and partitions
Attila Egri-Nagy (Hertfordshire) - Coordinatizing finite permutation groups and transformations semigroups - computational considerations
Victoria Gould (York) - Bisimple inverse semigroups as semigroups of quotients
Zsofia Juhasz (Essex) - The smallest operation-compatible quasiorders containing Green's quasiorders
Zak Mesyan (Ben Gurion) - Conjugation of injections by permutations
Markus Pfeiffer (St Andrews) - Semigroups with easily solveable word problem
Steve Pride (Glasgow) - On diagram groups
Abdullahi Umar (Sultan Qaboos) - Some combinatorial properties of semigroups of partial transformations

The fourth NBSAN meeting was held at the University of York on Wednesday 25th November 2009, organised by Victoria Gould. Speakers were:

Claire Cornock (York) - Structure theorems for proper restriction semigroups
Nick Gilbert (Heriot-Watt) - Approaches to tiling semigroups
Michael Hoffmann (Leicester) - Hyperbolic monoids
Marianne Johnson (Manchester) - Tropical matrix algebra
Jim Renshaw (Southampton) - Adequate transversals of abundant semigroups (abstract | slides)
Lubna Shaheen (York) - Perfection for pomonoids

The third NBSAN meeting was held on 23rd July 2009 at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, organised by Mark Lawson. The speakers were:

Chris Eilbeck (Heriot-Watt) - Weierstrass arithmetic semigroups and algebraic curves
Jennie Hansen (Heriot-Watt) - Using probability theory to study the full transformation monoid
Peter Higgins (Essex) - Set products in transformation semigroups
Stuart Margolis (Bar-Ilan) - On some monoids associated to Coxeter groups
James Mitchell (St Andrews) - Generating uncountable transformation semigroups

The second NBSAN meeting was held in St Andrews on 16th and 17th April 2009. The speakers were:

João Araújo (Lisbon) - Guess Who
Alan Cain (Lisbon) - Automaton Semigroups
Robert Gray (St Andrews) - Homotopical and Homological Finiteness Conditions of Monoids and their Subgroups
Mark Kambites (Manchester) - Free Adequate Semigroups
Vesna Kilibarda (Indiana Northwest) - Ends for Semigroups and Monoids
Valdis Laan (Tartu) - Tensor Products and Preservation of Weighted Limits for S-posets
Mark Lawson (Heriot-Watt, expository talk) - The Morita Theory of Regular Semigroups
László Márki (Rényi Institute) - A Matrix Construction for certain Inverse Monoids with an Application in Universal Algebra

The inaugural NBSAN meeting was held in York on 28th January 2009, and was dedicated to the memory of Professor Douglas Munn (1929-2008). The speakers were:

John Fountain (York, expository talk) - The Mathematical Work of Douglas Munn and its Influence
Nik Ruskuc (St Andrews, open problem talk) - One Relation Semigroups
Rebecca Noonan Heale (Heriot-Watt) - Green's Relations for Semigroup Graph Expansions
Yann H. Peresse (St Andrews) - Generating Transformation Semigroups using Endomorphisms of Preorders, Graphs and Similarity Relations
Pedro V. Silva (Porto) - The Generalized Conjugacy Problem for Virtually Free Groups
Jorge Almeida (Porto) - The Mysteries of Free Profinite Semigroups: a Sneak Preview