Color Me Curious – Oct 29

Mathematicians have spent decades wrestling with questions about coloring. Here’s one famous example: how many colors do mapmakers need to ensure that no two adjacent regions have the same color? Mathematicians struggled with that for over 100 years! In this colorful presentation, we’ll share these coloring problems, the exciting breakthroughs, and the problems which still need to be solved today.

Our speaker is Dr. Cornelia Van Cott, Professor of Mathematics (and department chair) at the University of San Francisco. As a geometric topologist, she studies knots, surfaces, and … the occasional just-colorful-enough map.

Dr. Cornelia Van Cott