CS Degree Day 22

Overview

This is what I find most rewarding about mathematics - the moment the abstraction snaps into something tangible. You need at most 4 colors to color any map such that no two adjacent regions share a color, and we couldn’t prove it until 1976, and even then only with a computer. That sits uneasily with me. Are there other truths we can only arrive at through computation, not through proof?

What I did today?

6.1200J Mathematics for Computer Science:

• Graph Theory: definitions, paths, cycles, connectivity
• Trees and spanning trees
• Coloring, planarity, Euler’s formula for planar graphs
• Bipartite graphs

Got through all lecture notes. No exam today, just problem sets.