Instructor: Robin Thomas
Prerequisite: Math 6014 Graph Theory
About this course: This is a
topics course. The topics change every year, even though the number
remains the same. Here is what was taught in 2003, 2005, 2006,
and in 2007.
Students may take this course repeatedly. This year we will work toward
the Graph Minor Theorem of Robertson and Seymour,
taking detours and covering many topics of independent interest in the
process. Thus the topics this year will be different from past years,
with only a small overlap with 2005.
Recommended text: None. The basics are covered in [Diestel,
Graph theory], for the rest references and handouts will be provided.
Requirements: Students registering for credit will be
expected
to do some (but not necessarily all) of the following:
Topics: Series-parallel graphs, tree-width and its relatives
(min-max theorems, applications to graph theory, algorithms, and
practical computation), well-quasi-ordering, excluded minor theorems,
spacial embeddings, disjoint paths in graphs, the graph minor theorem,
applications, extensions to directed graphs.
Here are my old notes about
tree-decompositions of graphs.