Bojan Mohar
IEEE Circuits and Systems Society joint Chapter of the Vancouver/Victoria Sections
Interdisciplinary Research in the Mathematical and Computational Sciences (IRMACS) Centre, SFU, Coast to Coast Seminar Spring 2012

Speaker: Dr. Boyan Mohar
Canada Research Chair in Graph Theory, Department of Mathematics, Simon Fraser University

Title: Five-Colour Theorem and Beyond

(Presentation is available in pdf format.)

Tuesday, March 6, 2012, 11:30 am - 12:20 pm
ASB 10900 (IRMACS Presentation Studio), Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Maps: IRMACS, SFU


Abstract

In 1994, Carsten Thomassen published a beautiful simple proof confirming that every planar graph is 5-list-colourable. Another beautiful proof on a similar topic was given a few years later by Mike Albertson who proved that every precolouring of a set of vertices in a planar graph that are far apart from each other can be extended to a 5-colouring of the whole graph. After presenting these enlightening contributions, the speaker will discuss possible common generalizations of these results and report on some recent progress.

Biography

Dr. Bojan Mohar is a Canada Research Chair in Graph Theory at the Simon Fraser University. His main research interests are in the interplay of graph theory, combinatorics, algebra, geometry and topology. He has published well over 200 research papers with his main results in algebraic and topological graph theory, graph minors and theoretical computer science. He is a coauthor with Carsten Thomassen of a book Graphs on Surfaces, which is considered as the central reference for the area of topological graph theory.


Last updated
Tuesday, March  6, 2012  1:43:49 PM PST