Hoser Film Festival and Research Forum (HFFRF)


Bob and Doug McKenzie - The Wind Beneath our Wings!
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Bob: "Fleshy-headed mutant, are you friendly?"
Doug: "No way, eh! R-radiation has made me an enemy of civilization!"

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:

  1. Gary D. Coker
  2. Robert B. Gardner
Participants enjoyed the available beverages of Michelob Ultra and margaritas. Some of the cuisine served includes pizza and eggs scrambled the Alton Brown way. An obvious oversight was the absence of jelley doughnuts and back bacon.

The Films

The 2004 meeting was a great success! The following films were viewed:


Strange Brew
(The original film which inspired the Hoser Film Festival)

Batman - The Movie

Blazing Saddles

The Empire Strikes Back

Pee Wee's Big Adventure

Top Secret

Young Frankenstein

Cosmos, Episode 1, The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean

Unfortunately, the films we viewed on a small 27 inch TV. Future meetings will take advantage of the new 60 inch TV installed in the main meeting room (i.e. Robert's living room).

The Research

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.

Relevant Websites

Some other websites of interest:

You Hoser
The McKenzie Brothers Web-site

NEWS FLASH: HFFRF2 PLANNED

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

SAD NEWS

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:

  1. G. Coker and R. Gardner, Some Rotational Automorphisms of Mendelsohn Triple and Quadruple Systems, Utilitas Mathematica, 47 (1995) 117-127 (MR#1330892/95m:05035).
  2. G. D. Coker, R. Gardner and R. Johnson, Decompositions of the Complete Digraph and the Complete Graph which admit certain Automorphisms, Congressus Numerantium, 108 (1995) 65-84 (MR#1369277/96h:05095).
  3. G. Coker, R. Gardner, P. Torbett and A. Weems, Bicyclic Decompositions of the Complete Digraph into Orientations of a 4-Cycle, Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing, 37 (2001) 43-52 )MR#1834430/2002b:05067).
  4. L. Brown, G. Coker, R. Gardner, and J. Kennedy, Packing the Complete Bipartite Graph with Hexagons, Congressus Numerantium, 174 (2005) 97-106 (MR#2193958/2006h:05168).
  5. D. Cantrell, G. Coker, and R. Gardner, Cyclic, f-Cyclic, and Bicyclic Decompositions of the Complete Graph into the 4-Cycle with a Pendant Edge, Utilitas Mathematica, 87 (2012), 245-253.
  6. B. Coker, G.D. Coker, and R. Gardner, Decompositions of Various Complete Graphs into isomorphic Copies of the 4-Cycle with a Pendant Edge, International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, 74(4) (2012) 485-492.
  7. B. Coker, G. Coker, R. Gardner, and Y. Xia, Packings and Coverings of Various Complete Graphs with the 4-Cycle with a Pendant Edge, ISRN Combinatorics, Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 236298, 8 pages.
In addition, a final manuscript was submitted in April 2013: B. Coker, G. Coker, R. Gardner, and Y. Xia, Packings and Coverings of Various Complete Graphs with the 4-Cycle with a Pendant Edge, submitted.

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.


Gary "Hoser" Coker and Robert "Knob" Gardner in Elon, NC
at the Second Hoser Film Festival and Research Forum in March 2010.

Return to Bob Gardner's webpage.
Last updated: May 29, 2015.