Shortly after solving the monopolar partition problem for line graphs, Jing Huang and I realized that our solution could be used to solve the “precoloured” version of the problem, and then further extended to claw-free graphs. Jing presented our result at the French Combinatorial Conference and the proceedings have now been published in Discrete Mathematics.
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I’ve published a new paper in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics! The work is the result of the research term I took as an undergraduate in the summer of 2009. It studies the edge versions of the monopolar and polar partition problems, and presents a linear-time solution to both.
I am grateful to NSERC for funding my work with a Undergraduate Student Research Award, and to my supervisor and coauthor Jing Huang.
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I was recently told that European hotels are subject to a reduced VAT rate. They must have a big lobby.
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My most recent talk in UVic’s discrete math seminar presented three poetic proofs by Adrian Bondy… and three actual poems summarizing the ideas in each one.
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The UK House of Lords recently debated a pest control problem in a scene straight out of a sitcom:
My Lords, I do not actually deal with the economy. I am glad to say that that would be above my pay grade, whereas trying to deal with the mice is probably just about right for me.
The Chairman of CommitteesAnother choice quote now immortalized in Hansard:
I invited Members of the House to telephone when they saw mice. The trouble is that when the person at the other end of the helpline goes to check this out, very often the mouse has gone elsewhere.
The Chairman of Committees -
If you’ve heard of Erdős numbers, Erdős-Bacon numbers, and the fact that Queen lead guitarist Brian May has a PhD, you may have wondered whether Brian May has a well-defined Erdős number.
As a matter of fact, he does! I traced down a collaboration path of length seven through a 1972 paper he published in Nature.
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Did you hear the one about the geology costume contest?
The gneiss guise finished last.
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One of my favourite video games of all time is the inexplicable Katamari Damacy. Its quirky premise involves, as Wikipedia puts it, “a diminutive prince rolling a magical, highly adhesive ball around various locations, collecting increasingly larger objects until the ball has grown great enough to become a star.” In other words, it’s the most successful game ever made about exponential growth.
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Based on corpus data, over half of the words in a typical page of English text has four or fewer letters, with the average word length being slightly less than five.
(more…)Length of… Mean Median Mode Unique words 7.52 7 7 Words weighted by frequency 4.95 4 3 -
According to an old piece of email forwarding-spam, it’s easy to read text even if you scramble all but the first and last letters in each word. But the truth is a bit more complicated.
The ancient meme reads:
Aoccdrnig to rseearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit plcae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
The form of this paragraph appears at first glance to provide direct evidence of its own “azanmig” claim. But something’s a little fishy: a lot of the words aren’t actually scrambled. Short words aren’t affected much if at all by the message’s middle-muddling, and most English words are short!
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