Professor Robin Wilson, Open University
Title: Four Colours Suffice
Thursday 19th October 2017 at 3pm, Eolas Seminar Room, Eolas Bulding.
Free Admission
Abstract: In this talk I present the history and proof of the four-colour theorem: Can every map be coloured with just four colours so that neighbouring countries are coloured differently? The proof took 124 years to find, and used 1200 hours of computer time. But what did it involve, and is it really a proof?
About Professor Robin Wilson:
Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Open University. Professor Wilson is a distinguished mathematician, working in the area of Graph Theory. He is also interested in the History of Mathematics, and is a noted expositor of Mathematics. In particular he has held the prestigious positions of Professor of Geometry and Visiting Professor in the History of Mathematics at Gresham College London, an institution which has been providing free public lectures for over 400 years (see https://www.gresham.ac.uk/about/). Professor Wilson is the son of former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. For more details please see his Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Wilson_(mathematician)
In conjunction with the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Maynooth University and MathsSoc