Septemberpocalypse
As I watched the pilot of Fear the Walking Dead, an inescapable truth dawned on me: it must be September once again. The days are shorter, leaves are falling, and it is my busiest time of year. Bar none. The university reanimates each September after a lull in the summer. Every seminar, committee, and course begins anew,…
Wall Cops and Robbers
My Masters student Fionn Mc Inerney and I introduced a new variant of the game of Cops and Robbers, where the cop has the ability to build “walls” on vertices. In Wall Cops and Robbers, there are two players: a cop and a robber. The game starts with the cop building a “wall” on a vertex which blocks off…
Mathematicians and the arts
Jason Brown is a both a mathematician and a blues guitarist. I introduced him at a public lecture at Ryerson University as “…the hardest working man in mathematical music” (with all due respect to James Brown!). Brown wrote a popular mathematics book Our Days are Numbered, which featured his work on the prevalence and influence of mathematics…
Riemann hypothesis and other great conjectures in Mathematics
I wrote a paper Sketchy Tweets: Ten Minute Conjectures in Graph Theory that appeared in the Mathematical Intelligencer about famous conjectures in graph theory, all of which can be tweeted. Many of the big problems in graph theory are easy to state, but very hard to settle. It was great fun writing the article, co-authored with good friend and colleague Richard Nowakowski. We were inspired by Meyniel’s conjecture on the cop number, and we had excess energy from just having published our book The Game of Cops and Robbers on Graphs.