Colloquium Announcement
Department of Mathematics
West Virginia University

for

Thursday, November 5,1998, at 3:45pm in 315 Armstrong Hall

(Tea and cookies begin at 3:00 in coffee room.)

Professor Hong-Jian Lai

WVU


Coloring a graph with elements in an abelian group

The talk will be suitable for a general audience.

Students are strongly encouraged to participate.

Abstract


Graph coloring is a model for scheduling problems and radio channel distribution problems. One of the classical problem in the arena of coloring is the 4-Color-Problem, which is now a theorem. What there will be in the post-4-Color-Theorem era?

In this talk, we review the duality between coloring and integer flows, first discovered by William Tutte. We view the dual problem of the coloring as a homogeneous system and investigate what the corresponding non homogeneous system can offer, and what the non homogeneous system will mean in the primal coloring problem.


The information on the future (and past) Colloquia can be also found on web at the address:

http://www.math.wvu.edu/homepages/kcies/colloquium.html