  We give an account of our work on transitive factorizations of permutations.
The work has had impact upon other areas of mathematics such as the enumeration
of graph embeddings, random matrices, branched covers, and the moduli spaces of
curves. Aspects of these seemingly unrelated areas are seen to be related in a
unifying view from the perspective of algebraic combinatorics. At several
points this work has intertwined with Richard Stanley's in significant ways.
