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The Earth-Moon Problem by Zachary Nadeau

Wednesday, March 6, 2019 12 p.m. Free
Mathematics Seminar

Imagine being a cartographer in a world where every country on Earth is advanced enough to own a colony on the moon. Now, imagine being tasked with coloring a map of the earth and a map of the moon so that the color of every country on Earth matches the color of its corresponding colony on the moon. If we wish for no two adjacent regions on either map to share the same color, what is the minimum number of colors required to color any configuration of Earth-Moon maps? In this talk, we will explore this Earth-Moon problem in terms of vertex coloring on graphs, and discuss how this situation differs from that of the famous four-color theorem. Additionally, we will give some partial results when the graphs have certain restrictions. This talk is intended for a general audience.

Location

Mathematics-Computer Science Building, 210