Erdős Memorial Lecture at the University of Notre Dame

March 8, 2006

Providence, RI:

The University of Notre Dame will host the 2006 Erdős (pronounced air-dish) Memorial Lecture, Inhomogeneous Random Graphs, by Béla Bollobás, Saturday April 8. Professor Bollobás holds appointments at the University of Memphis and at Cambridge University. The Lecture is part of the 2006 Spring Central Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society April 8-9 at the University. More than 400 mathematicians will gather at the University for the meeting.

Time of the Lecture : Saturday, April 8, 2006 at 5:10 pm.

Place : Room 101, DeBartolo Hall

Background : The Erdős Memorial Lecture is an annual invited address made possible by a fund created by Andrew Beal, a Dallas banker and mathematics enthusiast. The Lecture is named for Paul Erdős (1913-1996), one of the most prolific mathematicians ever, who published more than 1500 papers, and founded the theory of random graphs. The graphs in this case are different from the graphs drawn in high school algebra. This kind of graph is a collection of points, called vertices, in which some of all of the points are connected by line segments, called edges.

Graphs can be useful to model networks like the World Wide Web (in which web pages are the vertices and links between pages are the edges) and social interactions (in which people are the vertices and edges connect people who know one another). There's a very interesting graph in which the vertices correspond to movie stars and two vertices are connected by an edge if the stars involved have worked together on a film. (This graph is the basis for the trivia game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.")

Bollobás' lecture concerns graphs in which, for each pair of vertices, whether an edge is drawn between them is decided at random. These random decisions are made in such a way that there can be a wide variation in the number of edges that come out of the different vertices in the graph (just as there can be a wide variation in the number of links to a given web page or in the size of a given person's social network). Studying these random graphs has led to many fascinating discoveries about properties of graphs in general.

More information about the meeting, hosted by the University’s Department of Mathematics, can be found in the online program.

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Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, the 30,000-member American Mathematical Society fulfills its mission through programs and services that promote mathematical research and its uses, strengthen mathematical education, and foster awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and to everyday life.