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Tournament (mathematics)
A tournament is a directed graph (digraph) obtained by assigning a direction for each edge in an undirected complete graph. That is, it is an orientation of a complete graph, or equivalently a directed graph in which every pair of distinct vertices is connected by a directed edge (often, called an arc) with any one of the two possible orientations. Many of the important properties of tournaments were first investigated by H. G. Landau in to model dominance relations in flocks of chickens. Current applications of tournaments include the study of voting theory and social choice theory among other things. The name ''tournament'' originates from such a graph's interpretation as the outcome of a round-robin tournament in which every player encounters every other player exactly once, and in which no draws occur. In the tournament digraph, the vertices correspond to the players. The edge between each pair of players is oriented from the winner to the loser. If player a beats player b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hamiltonian Cycle
In the mathematical field of graph theory, a Hamiltonian path (or traceable path) is a path in an undirected or directed graph that visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian cycle (or Hamiltonian circuit) is a cycle that visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian path that starts and ends at adjacent vertices can be completed by adding one more edge to form a Hamiltonian cycle, and removing any edge from a Hamiltonian cycle produces a Hamiltonian path. Determining whether such paths and cycles exist in graphs (the Hamiltonian path problem and Hamiltonian cycle problem) are NP-complete. Hamiltonian paths and cycles are named after William Rowan Hamilton who invented the icosian game, now also known as ''Hamilton's puzzle'', which involves finding a Hamiltonian cycle in the edge graph of the dodecahedron. Hamilton solved this problem using the icosian calculus, an algebraic structure based on roots of unity with many similarities to the quaternions (also invented by Hami ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Szekeres
George Szekeres AM FAA (; 29 May 1911 – 28 August 2005) was a Hungarian–Australian mathematician. Early years Szekeres was born in Budapest, Hungary, as Szekeres György and received his degree in chemistry at the Technical University of Budapest. He worked six years in Budapest as an analytical chemist. He married Esther Klein in 1937.Obituary The Sydney Morning Herald Being , the family had to escape from the persecution so Szekeres took a job in Shanghai, China. There they lived through World War II, the Japanese occupation and the beginn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Esther Szekeres
Esther Szekeres ( hu, Klein Eszter; 20 February 191028 August 2005) was a Hungarian people, Hungarian–Australians, Australian mathematician. Biography Esther Klein was born to Ignaz Klein in a Jewish family in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary in 1910. As a young physics student in Budapest, Klein was a member of a group of Hungarians including Paul Erdős, George Szekeres and Pál Turán that convened over interesting mathematical problems. In 1933, Klein proposed to the group a combinatorics, combinatorial problem that Erdős named as the Happy Ending problem as it led to her marriage to George Szekeres in 1937, with whom she had two children. Following the outbreak of World War II, Esther and George Szekeres emigrated to Australia after spending several years in Hongkou District, Hongkew, a community of refugees located in Shanghai, China. In Australia, they originally shared an apartment in Adelaide with Márta Svéd, an old school friend of Szekeres, before moving to Sydney in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Erdős
Paul Erdős ( hu, Erdős Pál ; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. Much of his work centered around discrete mathematics, cracking many previously unsolved problems in the field. He championed and contributed to Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions in which order necessarily appears. Overall, his work leaned towards solving previously open problems, rather than developing or exploring new areas of mathematics. Erdős published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime, a figure that remains unsurpassed. He firmly believed mathematics to be a social activity, living an itinerant lifestyle with the sole purpose of writing mathematical papers with other mathem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Probabilistic Method
The probabilistic method is a nonconstructive method, primarily used in combinatorics and pioneered by Paul Erdős, for proving the existence of a prescribed kind of mathematical object. It works by showing that if one randomly chooses objects from a specified class, the probability that the result is of the prescribed kind is strictly greater than zero. Although the proof uses probability, the final conclusion is determined for ''certain'', without any possible error. This method has now been applied to other areas of mathematics such as number theory, linear algebra, and real analysis, as well as in computer science (e.g. randomized rounding), and information theory. Introduction If every object in a collection of objects fails to have a certain property, then the probability that a random object chosen from the collection has that property is zero. Similarly, showing that the probability is (strictly) less than 1 can be used to prove the existence of an object that does ''not ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Combinatorial Proof
In mathematics, the term ''combinatorial proof'' is often used to mean either of two types of mathematical proof: * A proof by double counting. A combinatorial identity is proven by counting the number of elements of some carefully chosen set in two different ways to obtain the different expressions in the identity. Since those expressions count the same objects, they must be equal to each other and thus the identity is established. * A bijective proof. Two sets are shown to have the same number of members by exhibiting a bijection, i.e. a one-to-one correspondence, between them. The term "combinatorial proof" may also be used more broadly to refer to any kind of elementary proof in combinatorics. However, as writes in his review of (a book about combinatorial proofs), these two simple techniques are enough to prove many theorems in combinatorics and number theory. Example An archetypal double counting proof is for the well known formula for the number \tbinom nk of ''k''-combi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paley Graph
In mathematics, Paley graphs are dense undirected graphs constructed from the members of a suitable finite field by connecting pairs of elements that differ by a quadratic residue. The Paley graphs form an infinite family of conference graphs, which yield an infinite family of symmetric conference matrices. Paley graphs allow graph-theoretic tools to be applied to the number theory of quadratic residues, and have interesting properties that make them useful in graph theory more generally. Paley graphs are named after Raymond Paley. They are closely related to the Paley construction for constructing Hadamard matrices from quadratic residues . They were introduced as graphs independently by and . Sachs was interested in them for their self-complementarity properties, while Erdős and Rényi studied their symmetries. Paley digraphs are directed analogs of Paley graphs that yield antisymmetric conference matrices. They were introduced by (independently of Sachs, Erdős, and Rén ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clique (graph Theory)
In the mathematical area of graph theory, a clique ( or ) is a subset of vertices of an undirected graph such that every two distinct vertices in the clique are adjacent. That is, a clique of a graph G is an induced subgraph of G that is complete. Cliques are one of the basic concepts of graph theory and are used in many other mathematical problems and constructions on graphs. Cliques have also been studied in computer science: the task of finding whether there is a clique of a given size in a graph (the clique problem) is NP-complete, but despite this hardness result, many algorithms for finding cliques have been studied. Although the study of complete subgraphs goes back at least to the graph-theoretic reformulation of Ramsey theory by , the term ''clique'' comes from , who used complete subgraphs in social networks to model cliques of people; that is, groups of people all of whom know each other. Cliques have many other applications in the sciences and particularly in bioinf ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ramsey Theory
Ramsey theory, named after the British mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, is a branch of mathematics that focuses on the appearance of order in a substructure given a structure of a known size. Problems in Ramsey theory typically ask a question of the form: "how big must some structure be to guarantee that a particular property holds?" More specifically, Ron Graham described Ramsey theory as a "branch of combinatorics". Examples A typical result in Ramsey theory starts with some mathematical structure that is then cut into pieces. How big must the original structure be in order to ensure that at least one of the pieces has a given interesting property? This idea can be defined as partition regularity. For example, consider a complete graph of order ''n''; that is, there are ''n'' vertices and each vertex is connected to every other vertex by an edge. A complete graph of order 3 is called a triangle. Now colour each edge either red or blue. How large must ''n'' be in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Directed Acyclic Graph
In mathematics, particularly graph theory, and computer science, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it consists of vertices and edges (also called ''arcs''), with each edge directed from one vertex to another, such that following those directions will never form a closed loop. A directed graph is a DAG if and only if it can be topologically ordered, by arranging the vertices as a linear ordering that is consistent with all edge directions. DAGs have numerous scientific and computational applications, ranging from biology (evolution, family trees, epidemiology) to information science (citation networks) to computation (scheduling). Directed acyclic graphs are sometimes instead called acyclic directed graphs or acyclic digraphs. Definitions A graph is formed by vertices and by edges connecting pairs of vertices, where the vertices can be any kind of object that is connected in pairs by edges. In the case of a directed graph, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reachability
In graph theory, reachability refers to the ability to get from one vertex to another within a graph. A vertex s can reach a vertex t (and t is reachable from s) if there exists a sequence of adjacent vertices (i.e. a walk) which starts with s and ends with t. In an undirected graph, reachability between all pairs of vertices can be determined by identifying the connected components of the graph. Any pair of vertices in such a graph can reach each other if and only if they belong to the same connected component; therefore, in such a graph, reachability is symmetric (s reaches t iff t reaches s). The connected components of an undirected graph can be identified in linear time. The remainder of this article focuses on the more difficult problem of determining pairwise reachability in a directed graph (which, incidentally, need not be symmetric). Definition For a directed graph G = (V, E), with vertex set V and edge set E, the reachability relation of G is the transitive closure ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
