Happy Birthday, Joan Hutchinson!

Bernard Lidický and I organized an AMS Special Session on Extremal and Structural Graph Theory last weekend. It was a wonderful session, filled with wonderful speakers talking about some amazing mathematics.

Notably missing was Joan Hutchinson, who we invited but she declined because she was celebrating a milestone birthday on Sunday. That’s a very good reason to miss the session, and we missed her greatly. However, we did want to share our well-wishes.

Thanks to all who helped with the session and the making of this video! A few participants were missing at the time of filming, but you can try finding your favorite graph theorists in the (very short) video above.

Shannon Capacity of Odd Cycles

Breaking news: Mathew and Östergård have improved lower bounds on the Shannon capacity of some odd cycles. These improvements over a very old and difficult problem come via some sophisticated algorithms.