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 meeting will be held in Manchester on Tuesday 30th August 2011, organised by Mark Kambites and Marianne Johnson. Speakers include... Alex Bailey (Southampton) Victoria Gould (York) Robert Gray (Lisbon) Christopher Hollings (Oxford) Lubna Shaheen (York) A full timetable will be available here nearer the time. As a rough guide for making travel arrangements, the meeting will start no earlier than 12:00 and end no later than 18:00. For those able to stay afterwards, we will probably be going out for an early dinner at a restaurant in the vicinity of Piccadilly railway station. All talks will be in room Frank Adams 1 on the first floor of the Alan Turing Building, which is fifteen minutes walk or a very short bus ride from Piccadilly station. For full directions (including from overseas) and other information on visiting Manchester please see.... Information on visiting Manchester If you have any other enquiries please feel free to contact Mark Kambites. Future Events The Autumn NBSAN meeting will 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.... Groups and Semigroups: Interactions and Computations in Lisbon, Portugal from 25th-29th July 2011 Special Session on Algorithmic and Geometric Properties of Groups and Semigroups at the AMS Fall Central Section Meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA from 14th-16th October 2011 To receive announcements of future NBSAN events, please enter your name and email address below and click "Subscribe". Alternatively, you can email Mark Kambites. Name: Email: Past Meetings The eighth NBSAN meeting was be held at the University of St Andrews on Thursday 19th and Friday 20th May 2011. The speakers were: Alan Cain (Porto) - Hyperbolic and word-hyperbolic semigroups (slides) Si Craik (St Andrews) - Ends of semigroups (slides) Andrew Duncan (Newcastle) - Rewriting systems and the geodesic problem for words and cycles John Fountain (York) - An inverse monoid approach to Thompson's group V and generalisations (slides) Marianne Johnson (Manchester) - Green's J-order and the rank of tropical matrices (slides) Dave Jones (Heriot Watt) - Graph Inverse Semigroups (slides) Mark Kambites (Manchester) - An Introduction to Tropical Matrix Semigroups Alistair Wallis (Heriot Watt) - Rees monoids, self-similar groups and fractals (slides) 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