Portland State University Discrete Mathematics Seminar

Fall 2015: Neuberger Hall 373, Mondays, 3pm–4pm (all quarters)

November 2, 2015

Nickolas Chura, Mount Hood Community College
You’ll never guess what happened next when this suburban math teacher realized he had to use abstract algebra to build a game!

abstract slides

I will tell an interactive story about my board game addicted 12-year-old daughter and how we found a need for group-theoretic combinatorics. Come ready to build a simple game and analyze it mathematically.

November 30, 2015

Kaelyn Flowerday, Portland State University
Unfolding trees and symmetrically-associated graphs

abstract

An unfolding tree is an object reflecting the connectivity of a vector-labelled graph. First introduced in theoretical computer science, unfolding trees have remained unexplored within graph theory. This talk investigates unfolding trees, focusing on an equivalence relation they induce between vertices. This leads to the definition of the class of symmetrically-associated graphs, which have predictably-behaved unfolding trees and can be viewed as a generalization of k-regular graphs.