Tonight is a Night for Spectral Graph Theory

I couldn't wait until Halloween to make this picture... pic.twitter.com/r9ivfghzpj

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) September 24, 2014

Meaningless Connections and Empty Entities

And I spend lots and lots of time studying these things, including in the context of applications like social media. ;)

pic.twitter.com/fPtP3XTUUG

— Ben Orlin (@benorlin) May 10, 2018

(Tip of the cap to Jane Shevtsov.)

Tritares: Generalizing Guitars to Star-Graph Topologies

In case you want to generalize guitars using ideas from star graphs, you can consider tritares (and generalizations from its Y-shape to star graphs of Stieltjes strings).

I saw a picture of a tritare from the following talk: Star graphs of Stieltjes strings, by Christiane Tretter (Bern, SUI)

You can read about the tritare at this article as well as this one.

They tried playing the sound (from an online video) before the first talk this morning, and it hurt.

Graph Alignment: A Major Open Problem

Graph Alignment is a major open problem in mathematics and computer science. pic.twitter.com/Q8EJDSYLge

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) April 20, 2017

A New Quasipolynomial Time Algorithm for Graph Isomorphisms

In case you haven't been paying attention, you may be interested in reading Jeremy Kun's post about the seminar covering the announced quasipolynomial algorithm for graph isomorphism. Once the preprint comes out and it is vetted, I hope the result does turn out to be genuine. Exciting times!

XKCD on Flowchorts

I don't find the new xkcd funny per se, but several parts of it do amuse me. Make sure to follow the flow in this chart.

Polymeric K_{3,3}

Some chemists have now constructed the graph K_{3,3} (and other tiny graphs) out of a polymer, and they seem to want to go after Königsberg next.

In related news, I think the South Side (aka: applied and related) of the Mathematical Institute now should annex the North Crystal, which just so happens to have a K_{3,3} graph as its vertices and edges.

(I'll be truely impressed, however, when somebody successfully constructs the ZKK graph using such polymers.)