Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire, B85pref (2020), 1 p.

Christian Krattenthaler

Preface

The 85th Meeting of the Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire took place from September 6 to 9, 2020, in the Bundesinstitut für Erwachsenenbildung in Strobl (Austria). This was a very special meeting in every respect. First of all, we (briefly) celebrated "40 years of Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire" (instigated by a reminder by Wadim Zudilin). More importantly, the meeting took place under the difficult circumstances created by the corona pandemic that had spread all over the world starting from December 2019 on. As a consequence, in the end only 8 attendees gathered at this beautiful place.

Only one of the two foreseen main lecturers could make it to Strobl. Frédéric Holweck (Belfort-Montbéliard) gave us an insightful introduction into the fascinating world of quantum computation, and then continued to present his recent work on "The Geometry of Quantum Algorithms".

The contributed talks (see the detailed list below) covered irrationality questions from number theory, partition theory, representation theory and cyclic sieving, tableau combinatorics, and a talk in memory of John Conway who had recently died from the corona disease.

Although small in number, the participants enjoyed the meeting enormously, particularly since for all of them it was the first in-person meeting after several months.