The much awaited International Conference on Discrete Mathematics - 2006 being hosted jointly by IISc Mathematics Initiative and Ramanujan Mathematical Society started today with Registration at 08.00 Hours (IST).

The inaugural function commenced in the Conference Hall of Materials Research Centre of the I.I.Sc. Campus at 09.15 Hours (IST). Professor C.E. Veni Madhavan welcomed the gatering and gave brief introduction about the campus, the facilities and the activities of I.I.Sc. Professor R. Balakrishnan then addressed the delegates and informed about the Conference Programme. He, on behalf of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society, gratefully acknowledged the services of the Local Organizing Committee for the nice arrangement of the Conference. Professor J. Nesetril then delivered the Inaugural Address, wherein he spoke briefly about the needs of Discrete Mathematics and the usefulness of the Conference.

The formal sessions of the conference commenced at 10.15 Hours (IST). The first Plenary Talk was delivered by Professor Carsten Thomassen, Technical University of Denmark. He spoke on "List-coloring and the number of colorings of a graph". This was followed by two invited talks - "Almost Ramsey Type Theorems for directed graphs" by Professor S.B. Rao, ISI, Kolkatta, India, and "Some recent results on Domination in Graphs" by Professor M.D. Plummer, Vanderbilt University, USA. The invited talks session was chaired by Professor J. Nesetril.

Post lunch sessions commenced at 14.15 Hours (IST). The first session was chaired by Professor E. Sampathkumar, Mysore, India. There were two invited talks - "Coloring the arcs of digraphs with bounded in or out-degree and applications" by Professor F. Havet, France and "Resistance Matrix and q-Laplacian of a unicyclic graph" by Professor R.B. Bapat, ISI, New Delhi, India. The second session was chaired by Professor Pavol Hell, Canada. There were two invited talks - "A discussion of constrained binary embeddings with applications to crypto-analysis of irregularly clocked stream ciphers" by Professor Diane Donovan, Australia and "Disjoint Dominating Sets" by Professor Renu Laskar, Clemson University, USA.