Spring 2007 GSS Schedule

Organizers: Robert Beeler and Jeremy Lyle

Date Speaker Topic Abstract
January 22 John Chrispell An Introduction to Latex TeX, created by Donald E. Knuth, is a high quality way of typesetting mathematical notation and ordinary text. LaTeX documents are created using a markup language much like html. In this talk, I will start from scratch, and show how to create a document using TeXnicCenter. Potential talk topics will include:
  1. Environments
  2. Mathematical Tables and Arrays
  3. Including Figures and Listings
  4. Slide Presentations
  5. Tricks for Large Documents including:
    • Citations,
    • Bibliographies, and
    • Table of Contents
Others may be covered as time permits.
January 29 Stacey Faulkenberg and
Christine Kraft
Some helpful software for linear and nonlinear programming We will present and solve a linear program in LINDO, Matlab, SAS/OR, and CPLEX. We will briefly discuss the differences in the packages. We will also present and solve a non-linear program in Matlab, Maple, SAS/OR, and CPLEX. We will post the code so that everyone may use it as a starting point for their programming. Please come to learn and make suggestions!
February 5 Jobby Jacob An Algorithm for the Single-Source Unsplittable Flow Problem Let G=(V,E) be a capacitated directed graph with single source s and k terminals t_1, t_2,...,t_k with demands d_1,d_2,...,d_k respectively. The objective for the single source unspittable flow problem is to unsplittably route every demand on a single path from s to the corresponding terminal without violating the capacities.

In (1) the authors propose an algorithm which will compute an unsplittable flow satisfying the demands such that the total flow through any edge exceeds its capacity by at most the maximum demand provided the necessary cut condition is satisfied. For the graphs in which all the capacities are at least the maximum demand, the algorithm will therefore obtain an unsplittable flow with congestion at most 2. We will also see how all demands can be routed unsplittably in 5 rounds, as well as some results in maximizing the total demand satisfied unsplittably.

[1] Yefim Dinitz, Naveen Garg and Michel Goemans, On the Single-Source Unsplittable Flow Problem, Combinatorica, 19:17-41, 1999.
February 12 Cancelled
March 5 Jeremy Lyle Dense Triangle-Free Graphs What is the minimum degree for which a triangle-free graph must be bipartite? What is the minimum degree for which a triangle-free graph can have an arbitrarily large chromatic number? What happens in between? We consider the answers or partial answers to these questions.
March 19 Spring Break
March 26 Robert Beeler Automorphic Decompositions of Graphs
April 2 Robert Beeler Experiences on the Job Search
April 16 Timur Milgrom Approximate Solutions to some Elliptic PDE's An approximation of the Hilbert transform is established, for which we derive properties that are useful for solving linear PDEs and proving the existence of the solution of a system of non-linear PDEs. The approximation is applied to the Laplace equation and the limit is taken as the approximation parameter goes to zero which is compared to the exact solution. Finally, we give a proof of the existence of an approximate solution for a system of equations related to the vortex sheet without surface tension.