This talk is part of the Barbara T. Faires Allegheny Mountain Colloquium, which aims to provide excellent math talks for undergraduates and to promote the mathematics done in our section. All speakers are based within the Allegheny Mountain Section. We hope that you'll join us for the first colloquium of the school year!
When: Tuesday, September 24th, 4-5 PM EST
Dr. Boris Brimkov of Slippery Rock University will be speaking on "Propagation problems in graphs".
Abstract: What does monitoring the electrical power grid have in common with getting good movie recommendations from Netflix, tracking the spread of information in social networks, searching for a fugitive who is trying to evade capture, and controlling a quantum system? All these tasks, and several others, can be modeled as graph propagation problems (in fact, they are all essentially the same problem), and they can be approached with the same battery of computational techniques. In this talk, we will explore the origins and applications of propagation problems in graphs, and discuss some of the solution techniques and remaining challenges related to these problems.