Preface : the second Malta conference in graph theory and combinatorics

The Second Malta Conference in Graph Theory and Combinatorics was held in June 2017. This conference commemorated the 75th birthday of Professor Stanley Fiorini, who had introduced graph theory and combinatorics at the University of Malta. Many may wonder when the previous Malta Conference was held. The First Malta Conference on Graphs and Combinatorics was convened during the period 28 May to 2 June, 1990, at the Suncrest Hotel, in Qawra, St Paul’s Bay. It differed from a number of similar conferences held in the central Mediterranean region at that time in that it consisted of three types of talks. László Lovász and Carsten Thomassen delivered two instructional courses of five one-hour lectures each; the former was A Survey of Independent Sets in Graphs and the latter was Embeddings of Graphs. There were also four invited speakers, L.W. Beineke, N.L. Biggs, R. Graham and D.J.A. Welsh, each of whom gave a one-hour lecture. The third type were the twenty-minute contributed talks running in two parallel sessions and given by 39 speakers. Volume 124 (1994) of the journal Discrete Mathematics was a special edition dedicated to this conference; it was edited by Stanley Fiorini and Josef Lauri, and it consisted of 22 selected papers.N/