The conference Matching, Matroids, and Extensions in honour of Bill Cunningham's 65th birthday was held at the University of Waterloo from June 11-13, 2012. The conference was co-organized by Bill's colleagues Joseph Cheriyan, Ricardo Fukasawa, Jim Geelen, and Levent Tuncel.
The conference began with talks by Bill Pulleyblank, Bill Cook, and Alexander Schrijver. These three leaders in combinatorial optimization, together with Bill Cunningham, have authored a well-known graduate textbook on Combinatorial Optimization. There were talks by several of Bill Cunningham's Ph.D. students and postdocs, namely, Sylvia Boyd, Eddie Cheng, Kevin Cheung, Jim Geelen, and Francisco Zaragoza.
Some of the scientific highlights were provided in two talks by Satoru Iwata and Gyula Pap on their independent discovery of a long-sought after goal in the area, namely, a polynomial-time algorithm for the weighted matroid parity problem. Several of Bill's co-authors, collaborators and researchers with similar research interests presented talks, including Bob Bixby, Maria Chudnovsky, Kazuo Murota, Sergey Norin, Andras Sebo, Bruce Shepherd, and Donald Wagner.
Throughout the conference, there were numerous occasions for research discussions and some socializing. The social highlight of the conference was the banquet on the evening of June 12. Besides the excellent dinner, there were a number of speeches on Bill's research career and its impact in Canada and abroad. By far the best one was Bill's heart-felt speech, going over his career, discussing the mentors who had guided him on the path of research, his long academic career spread over Canada, France, Germany, and the U.S.A., and the culmination of his career, back in the same department that had shaped him as a student, and that he led and shaped as chair over eight years.