Events & Calendars David Cox of Amherst College: "Graphs, Sudoku and Equations"

Abstract: "On the surface, polynomial equations look like a part of algebra, which is very different from graph theory, where the basic objects consist of vertices linked by edges. And both of these seem totally removed from the Sudoku puzzles that appear in newspapers and on the web. In my lecture, I will explain that if you color the vertices of a graph so that vertices linked by an edge have different colors, then you get a system of polynomials that can shed light on the original coloring problem. I will also show how to recast a Sudoku puzzle as a graph-coloring problem, which will enable us to use the computational theory of polynomial equations to solve Sudoku puzzles."