!! CANCELLED TO BE RESCHEDULED !!
Thackeray 704
Notes
Neal Bushaw is associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at Virginia Commonwealth University. Prior to his 2017 arrival in Richmond, he was a grade school student in Bremerton Washington, an undergrad in Boulder, a grad student in Bellingham and Memphis, a postdoc in Tempe and Rio de Janeiro, and a frequent guest of Trinity College Cambridge.
His research interests center around “easy problems” — problems that are easy to state and think about, but difficult to solve. Mostly these problems lie within extremal graph theory and combinatorics. He is also interested in expressing this mathematics in diverse ways, exploring its interactions with art and music in recent work. In his spare time, he enjoys listening to / making / thinking about music, doing mathematics in public, and spending time in the outdoors.
Abstract or Additional Information
A network is being infected by a very mathematical virus -- any susceptible node becomes infected if it is connected to at least two already infected nodes. This process is known as 2-bootstrap percolation, and it has its origins in statistical physics. In the Summer of 2019, with a large group ranging from high school students to full professors, we used Automated Conjecturing software to discover which networks are MOST susceptible. In this talk, we give a history of this model and a few of its applications, discuss the Automated Conjecturing software we used, and see some of the results obtained during and since this working group. Further, we'll spend a little time discussing the somewhat unusual (and budget-free) large lab environment in which this work was initiated.
This talk is intended for a general audience, and assumes no particular mathematical background; the software used is open-source and publicly available.