The Lotharingian impact on Combinatorial Mathematics: myth or reality?

It is very fortunate that two, and sometimes three, sessions of the Séminaire Lotharingien have been held every year since its beginning in 1980. Otherwise, several of us, at least the confirmed optimists, would have witnessed the jubilee in Paradise! Anyway, this is a great privilege to have all of you here, at the Domaine Saint-Jacques, a place regarded as a valeur sûre by the younger generation. In fact, the Seminar had long been in limbo, all through the seventies, when regular meetings on Combinatorics were organized at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut, Oberwolfach under the direction of Konrad Jacobs, a distinguished probabilist, but also a great promoter of the combinatorial methods in Mathematics. Suddenly, the Oberwolfach Institute had become too small to shelter all the European mathematicians interested in Combinatorics. It became urgent to create a new structure, where everybody could come, bring his contribution and be exposed to the current ideas of that field. As had been told on several occasions, the Lotharingian Seminar had a true spontaneous birth at Strasbourg in 1980, at a time when Adalbert (a true Lotharingian Christian name!) Kerber kept shuttling between Aachen (the seat of Charlemagne’s kingdom) and Bayreuth. Volker Strehl, already based in Erlangen, responded to the idea with a great enthusiasm and accepted to be the third pillar of the whole edifice. As a matter of fact, he immediately made the suitable arrangements for the second session that took place in Burg Feuerstein, near Bamberg, the same year, in the Fall 1980.