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SEMINAR: Groups and Combinatorics Seminar: The Merino-Welsh Conjecture

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Today's date is Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Groups and Combinatorics Seminar: The Merino-Welsh Conjecture Other events...
Groups and Combinatorics Seminar

Steven Noble (Brunel University, UK)

will speak on

The Merino-Welsh Conjecture

at 11am Wednesday 2nd of May in MLR2

Abstract: The Merino-Welsh conjecture states that for any loopless, bridgeless graph G, the maximum of the number of acyclic orientations and the number of totally cyclic orientations of G is at least the number of spanning trees of G.

Each of these invariants is an evaluation of the Tutte polynomial, which is a two-variable graph polynomial with positive coefficients. Computational evidence hints that for bridgeless, loopless graphs, the Tutte polynomial might be convex along the portion of lines x+y = constant lying in the positive quadrant. The conjecture is a first small step towards resolving this question.

We will explain the motivation behind the conjecture and discuss some generalizations, in particular to matroids. We will then show that the most general convexity conjecture holds for a large class of matroids and that something much weaker holds for all loopless, bridgeless matroids. Almost no knowledge of matroids will be assumed!

All welcome
Speaker(s) Steven Noble
Location Maths Lecture Room 2
Contact Michael Giudici <[email protected]>
Start Wed, 02 May 2012 11:00
End Wed, 02 May 2012 11:45
Submitted by Michael Giudici <[email protected]>
Last Updated Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:43
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