Mathematics Department, SUM Series lecture
October 20, 2016 at NCSU.
Talk given:
How many colors do you need to color a map so no adjacent countries have the same color? How many different platonic solids are there? When driving to a large number of cities, in what order should you visit them to minimize the distance traveled? Just how difficult is NCSU’s job of fitting hundreds of lectures into the fragmented class schedules of thousands of humans? To try to answer these questions, we turn to Graph theory—it’s not just the best and most fun field in Math; it’s also the most versatile! We’ll walk through basic definitions and build to a discussion of some of the above famous graph theory problems, and finish by introducing Ramsey Theory and a puzzle that the revered mathematician Erdos joked would be more difficult to solve than it would be to defeat alien invaders.