Thursday, November 15, 4:10-5:00pm
3866 EH
Kelli Talaska (UM)
Tutte's polynomial

Tutte's polynomial is a two-variable polynomial which can be thought of as a generalization of the chromatic polynomial, which encodes the number of vertex colorings of a graph. It is defined recursively, using edge contraction and deletion. We will look at a number of graph invariants which can be obtained as specializations of the Tutte polynomial.