So Long, and Thanks for All the Theorems

Since I first learned about graph theory in my intro algorithms class, I have been intensely focused towards learning more about graphs and doing mathematics as a passion and a profession. At the end of this semester, I close the book on that part of my career, leave my academic position, and return to my original plan: developing software.

Spring Happenings

It has been a month and a half since my last post, which was not intentional. However, there are a couple pretty good reasons why.

1. The semester came to a close, and together my two classes had six exams (midterms, make-ups, and finals) in a span of three weeks.

2. My wife and I accepted tenure-track jobs at Iowa State University and have been working hard making plans for the move this summer.

Thanks for your patience and I hope to be back on topic very soon.

New Page: Syllabus

I’ve added a new page to the top bar of the blog: a syllabus! Part of the goal of this blog is to develop a set of lecture materials for a future topics course in Computational Combinatorics. Since we are a few topics in, I thought it would be good to organize them by topic in a somewhat reasonable order (and the order I would present them in a course). As part of that effort, I have also placed a few topics on the list for future posts. Take a look!

New Page: Computational Resources

I added a new page for computational combinatorics resources. It contains a list of software and lists of graph classes. Please let me know if you know of other resources that can be useful and I will update the page.

Sorry for the lack of posts, but we will return shortly to investigate some example implementations of canonical deletion.

Is anybody out there?

Being 8 weeks and 8 posts into this blog, I thought I’d do a quick status check. Is anybody reading?

Welcome to the Computational Combinatorics Blog

The internet is full of blogs. This is another. Hopefully, this blog will be something new.

There are many blogs featuring technical content. Specifically, there are blogs that document topics in mathematics, combinatorics, theoretical computer science, computational complexity, and many more. Here, the discussion will be focused on computational combinatorics. I believe that it is far too difficult to discover computational methods for combinatorics, and this blog will make it easier.

I define “computational combinatorics” as the use of algorithms and computers to assist in the discovery and proof of combinatorial theorems. Hence, the problems we investigate are inherently combinatorial, but the tools we discuss are very computational.

I plan on having a few different types of posts on this blog:

• Introduction to a Computational Technique. These posts will highlight a specific computational technique and discuss how to use the technique as well as previous uses.
• Announcement of Computational Results. When a new result in combinatorics is published (or made available online) a post will present a high-level description of the results and techniques used in the paper. I plan to write such a post for each of my computational combinatorics papers, but I will also write about other papers I read. If you have a computational combinatorics result that you would like to share, please contact me about writing a guest post (you can also contact me about writing a guest post for any other type of post as well).
• Tips and Tricks. Not all computational techniques are substantial enough to be included in a final research paper, but these tools should be shared. Typically, these will be short examples of using Sage or other software tools to discover new examples of combinatorial objects. 

As the blog develops, other types of posts will be discovered.

I plan to write a post every two weeks, and hope to write a post every week.