Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire, B81pref (2020), 1 p.

Michael Schlosser, Volker Strehl and Jean-Yves Thibon

Preface

At the 81st meeting of the Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire, which took place at the traditional place at Strobl in the beautiful Salzkammergut region from September 9 to 12 in 2018, we had the immense pleasure to celebrate the 60th birthday of Christian Krattenthaler. The name KrattenthalerFest for this event is justified in any respect, all the more that not only was the scientific programme devoted to invited presentations in his honor, given by 14 scientific friends of Christian, but Christian himself offered a piano recital to his more than 80 guests at the Mozarthaus in Sankt Gilgen, followed by a dinner at the Gasthaus zur Post.

The scientific programme can be seen from the corresponding section of the SLC pages. Most of the lectures are documented by providing the slides. In addition, a congratulation from the perspective of Christian's Ph.D. students, contributed by Theresia Eisenkölbl, can be found there, as well as a group photograph (in higher resolution), a list of all the participants, and two excerpts from the piano recital. Markus Fulmek took a lot of spontaneous pictures during the meeting - these can be found here.

Subsequent to the meeting we invited the participants to submit articles in honor of Christian for publication in volume 81 of our electronic journal. The contributions which you find here, have been refereed according to our usual standards. Due to some heavy-weight contributions publication took some time.

Thanks go to the contributing authors, the referees, and last but not least to Christian himself for painstakingly (as usual) fine-tuning the formatting of the articles.

Michael Schlosser, Vienna,
Volker Strehl, Erlangen,
Jean-Yves Thibon, Marne-la-Vallée,

in the name of all the organizers of the memorable Krattenthalerfest.