The Center for

Discrete Mathematics Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" (in a way analogous to discrete variables, having a bijection with the set of natural numbers) rather than "continuous" (analogously to continuous f ...

and

Theoretical Computer Science Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory. It is difficult to circumsc ...

(DIMACS) is a collaboration between

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

, and the research firms

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

, Applied Communication Sciences, and

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

. It was founded in 1989 with money from the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

. Its offices are located on the Rutgers campus, and 250 members from the six institutions form its permanent members. DIMACS is devoted to both theoretical development and practical applications of discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science. It engages in a wide variety of evangelism including encouraging, inspiring, and facilitating researchers in these subject areas, and sponsoring conferences and workshops. Fundamental research in discrete mathematics has applications in diverse fields including Cryptology, Engineering, Networking, and Management Decision Support. Past directors have included Fred S. Roberts,

Daniel Gorenstein Daniel E. Gorenstein (January 1, 1923 – August 26, 1992) was an American mathematician. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1950 under Oscar Zariski, introducing in his dissertati ...

András Hajnal András Hajnal (May 13, 1931 – July 30, 2016) was a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences known for his work in set theory and combinatorics. Biography Hajnal was born on 13 May 1931, ...

, and

Rebecca N. Wright Rebecca N. Wright (born 1967) is an American computer scientist known for her research in computer security. She is the Druckenmiller Professor of Computer Science at Barnard College. Education and career Wright was an undergraduate at Columbia ...

.A history of mathematics at Rutgers
Charles Weibel.

The DIMACS Challenges

DIMACS sponsors implementation challenges to determine practical algorithm performance on problems of interest. There have been eleven DIMACS challenges so far. * 1990-1991: Network Flows and Matching * 1992-1992:

NP-Hard In computational complexity theory, NP-hardness ( non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness) is the defining property of a class of problems that are informally "at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP". A simple example of an NP-hard pr ...

Problems: Max Clique,

Graph Coloring In graph theory, graph coloring is a special case of graph labeling; it is an assignment of labels traditionally called "colors" to elements of a graph subject to certain constraints. In its simplest form, it is a way of coloring the vertices o ...

, and

SAT The SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and scoring have changed several times; originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, it was later called the Schol ...

* 1993-1994: Parallel Algorithms for Combinatorial Problems * 1994-1995: Computational Biology: Fragment Assembly and Genome Rearrangement * 1995-1996: Priority Queues, Dictionaries, and Multidimensional Point Sets * 1998-1998: Near Neighbor Searches * 2000-2000: Semidefinite and Related Optimization Problems * 2001-2001: The

Traveling Salesman Problem The travelling salesman problem (also called the travelling salesperson problem or TSP) asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each cit ...

* 2005-2005: The

Shortest Path Problem In graph theory, the shortest path problem is the problem of finding a path between two vertices (or nodes) in a graph such that the sum of the weights of its constituent edges is minimized. The problem of finding the shortest path between tw ...

* 2011-2012:

Graph Partitioning In mathematics, a graph partition is the reduction of a Graph (discrete mathematics), graph to a smaller graph by partition of a set, partitioning its set of nodes into mutually exclusive groups. Edges of the original graph that cross between the g ...

and Graph Clusteringbr>
* 2013-2014: Steiner tree problem, Steiner Tree Problems * 2020-2021: Vehicle Routing Problems

References

External links

DIMACS Website
{{authority control 1989 establishments in New Jersey Combinatorics Discrete mathematics Rutgers University Mathematical institutes