5-day minicourse on   Graphs, Eigenvalues, and Geometric Representations by Prof. László Lovász, Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington, USA

László Lovász was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1948. He obtained his doctoral degree in mathematics from the Eötvös Loránd University, in Budapest, Hungary in 1971. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and three other Academies. He was Professor of the A. József University of Szeged, the L. Eötvös  University in Budapest, and Yale University. Currently he is Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. His awards include the Brouwer Medal (1993) and the Wolf Prize (1999). His field of research is discrete mathematics, in particular its applications in the theory of algorithms and the theory of computing.

Contents
Connections between eigenvalues of adjacency matrices of graphs and graph-theoretic properties has been subject  to intense research. Various geometric representations of graphs have also been studied and used in a variety of ways: for example, planar graphs can be represented by convex polyhedra. Other representations (like orthogonal representations) have applications to graph algorithms.

In this course we show that there is a very tight connection between eigenvalues and geometric representations. Eigensubspaces of (weighted) adjacency matrices lead to embeddings of graphs in euclidean spaces, reflecting graph theoretic properties. For example, for 3-connected planar graphs, this method gives representations as 3-polytopes, and all polytopal representations can be obtained this way. The topic is closely tied with a spectral invariant introduced by Colin de Verdiere.

Time and place
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The  Netherlands, April 22 - 26, 2002.

Admission fee
The admission fee for a minicourse is Euro 680 (NLG 1500). However, our courses are free of charge for EIDMA members and for university students. Reductions or exemptions do apply to members of other academic institutes.

Registration
You can register by sending an e-mail to mrs. Henny Houben at eidma@tue.nl   before April 8, 2002.
 

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