Bob and Doug McKenzie - The Wind Beneath our Wings!
The first (triannual?) Hoser Film Festival and Research Forum was held at the residence of Dr. Robert Gardner on July 30 to August 1, 2004. The intent of this forum is to expose the participants to some of the greatest films of all time, with intermittent episodes of combinatorial research.
The participant list for the 2004 gathering is as follows:
The 2004 meeting was a great success! The following films were viewed:
Batman - The Movie |
Blazing Saddles |
The Empire Strikes Back |
Pee Wee's Big Adventure |
Top Secret |
Young Frankenstein |
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Cosmos, Episode 1, The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean |
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After much thought (and beers, eh?), the following problem was posed: Decompositions, Packings, and Coverings of the Complete Digraph the the Complete Digraph with a Hole into Alternating 6-Cycles. The alternating 6-cycle is sometimes denoted AC6. Decompositons of the complete digraph into copies of AC6 was studied by Varma. The proposed problems would extend Varma's work to packings and coverings, as well as to the complete digraph with a hole. Although these things are much less complicated when dealing with cycles of even length, the collection of problems proposed could take a good deal of time to solve.
UPDATE (2005): With time, the focus of the research has taken a shift. It appears that the undirected versions of these problems have not been solved. Initial work in this direction has been taken by Gardner and Nguyen in "4-Cycle Packings and Coverings of the Complete Graph with a Hole" (you can also find the relevant definitions in this work). It is hoped that the second Hoser Film Festival and Research Forum can be used to make progress on this new problem.
UPDATE (2007): A problem related to 6-cycle packings and coverings of the complete graph with a hole has been successfully completed and published. The paper is: Packing the Complete Bipartite Graph with Hexagons, Congressus Numerantium, 174 (2005) 97-106. It was coauthored by L. Brown, G. Coker, R. Gardner, and J. Kennedy. A preprint is available in PDF format. Covering the complete graph with hexagons is being addressed in the ETSU master's thesis of L. Brown, under the direction of R. Gardner. The undirected problem mentioned in the 2005 Update above is being studied by J. Kennedy and R. Gardner, in a project titled: Decomposing and Packing the Complete Graph with a Hole into Hexagons.
Some other websites of interest:
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The Second Hoser Film Festival and Research Forum was originally planned for 2009. For details, click here. However, this did not work out. As a result, a brief HFFRF2 meeting has been arranged to take place at the 2010 annual meeting of the Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America. It will be held on March 26-27 at Elon University in North Carolina. For the latest details, check out the new HFFRF2 website
On May 29, 2013 Gary "Hoser" Coker died suddenly of a heart condition. So there will be no more Hoser Film Festivals and Research Forums. However, the success of the past HFFRFs, combined with productive phone calls and e-mail correspondence, lead to a total of seven collaborative Coker/Gardner (more appropriately, "Hoser/Knob") publications. Here's the list:
The "B. Coker" in the last two listed papers is Brandon Coker, the middle son of Gary. Gary was happy to be involved in math research over the years, and particularly proud to do work with his son.
The Hoser will be missed.
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 Gary "Hoser" Coker and Robert "Knob" Gardner in Elon, NC at the Second Hoser Film Festival and Research Forum in March 2010. |
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Return to Bob Gardner's webpage.
Updated: May 29, 2015; Cosmetic changes made: June 6, 2024.