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 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 at the University of Manchester on the afternoon of Monday 26th July 2010. The provisional schedule is as follows:

12:30    Early arrivers meet for informal lunch in ground floor snackbar
13:30Zur Izhakian (Bar Ilan) - Supertropical algebra
14:30Erzsi Dombi (Glasgow) - Automatic semigroup acts
15:30Coffee and Proving Theorems
16:00Rick Thomas (Leicester) - FA-presentable semigroups
17:00Close, followed by an early dinner at a restaurant near Piccadilly Station

The meeting will be in the Alan Turing Building, which is number 46 on the campus map. All talks will be in room Frank Adams 1, on the first floor. Early arrivers may wish to congregate for lunch from 12:30 onwards in the snackbar on the ground floor of the building. After the talks we will go for an early dinner at a restaurant in the city centre. Here is a page of detailed information for visitors to Manchester.

We have a limited amount of funding available to support the attendance costs of UK-based graduate students. If you would like to be considered for funding, please contact Mark Kambites indicating your expected attendance costs and whether you have any other source of funding.

Future Meetings

The Autumn meeting will be held in York, provisionally on either Wednesday 24th November or Wednesday 1st December. The exact date and more details will appear here nearer the time.

To receive announcements of future events, please enter your name and email address below and click "Subscribe". Alternatively, you can email Mark Kambites.

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Past Meetings

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