Tag Archives: graphs

OuLiPo

Posted on 08/01/2015 by

OuLiPo, or Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (which they translate as “Charity bazaar of potential literature”) were a collection of writers I knew little about until yesterday. I knew a couple of things: Martin Gardner wrote about them, mentioning among other … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematics and ... | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Easy to state, hard to solve?

Posted on 31/07/2014 by

I described here how Pablo Spiga and I showed that all but finitely many nontrivial switching classes of graphs with primitive automorphism group contain a graph with trivial automorphism group, and found the six exceptions. (The trivial switching classes are … Continue reading →

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Solutions

Posted on 08/10/2013 by

The word “solutions” is much overused, even misused, now. When I see a van with “Cleaning solutions” on the side, I imagine it full of containers of ammonia or soapy water, while “Printing solutions” can only mean ink … But … Continue reading →

Posted in books, teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Primitive graphs

Posted on 11/01/2013 by

A primitive graph is one whose automorphism group acts primitively on the vertices: that is, the group is transitive on the vertices, and there is no non-trivial equivalence relation which it preserves. This post is not about why primitive graphs … Continue reading →

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The arXiv

Posted on 19/08/2011 by

It will be absolutely clear to anyone who has given this blog more than a casual glance that I am a dinosaur mired in the 1960s or thereabouts, and quite out of tune with the modern world of Facebook, impact, … Continue reading →

Posted in exposition, open problems, the Web | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

MathOverflow

Posted on 05/08/2011 by

Today I put a toe into the pool that is MathOverflow for the first time. My question was: Which graphs have the property that the number of i-vertex induced subgraphs is at most i for some i<n/2 (where n is … Continue reading →

Posted in doing mathematics, mathematics | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Transitivity and synchronization

Posted on 15/07/2011 by

Let Sn be the symmetric group of all permutations of {1,…,n}, and Tn the full transformation monoid of all functions from this set to itself. Recently I have come to the meta-conjecture that there is a fairly close analogy between … Continue reading →

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