The British Combinatorial Conference is held every two years and is a key event for mathematicians worldwide working in combinatorics. In June 2003 the conference was held at the University of Wales, Bangor. The papers contained here are surveys contributed by the invited speakers and are of the high quality that befits the event. There is also a tribute to Bill Tutte who had a long-standing association with the BCC.

The papers cover topics currently attracting significant research interest as well as some less traditional areas such as the combinatorics of protecting digital content. They will form an excellent resource for established researchers as well as graduate students who will find much here to inspire future work.

Contents

• Decompositions of complete graphs: embedding partial edge-colourings and the method of amalgams L. D. Anderson and C. A. Rodger
• Combinatorial schemes for protecting digital content Simon R. Blackburn
• Matroids and Coxeter groups A. V. Borovik
• Defining sets in combinatorics : A survey D.M. Donovan, E.S. Mahmoodian, C.Ramsay and A.P. Street
• Finite projective planes with a large Abelian group D. Ghinelli and D. Jungnickel
• Algorithmic aspects of graph homomorphisms P. Hell
• Counting lattice triangulations V. Kaibel and G. Ziegler
• Partition regular equations I. Leader
• Kostka-Foulkes polynomials and Macdonald spherical functions K. Nelsen and A. Ram