Monday, July 8, 2013

Hunting for Answers



     Okay, so some of you have probably seen the movie Good Will Hunting. In that movie, he solves what is purported to be an incredibly difficult math problem. Actually, he solves two problems, but the one we are concerned with here is the second one. It isn't explained in the movie, but we can see that is must have something to do with lines and dots.
     All right, so what is the problem. Well, we'll sort out the wording, but it is:
          Draw all homeomorphically irreducible trees of size n = 10.
     Homeomorphically irreducible means that it does not have only two lines going to only one dot. A tree, for our purposes, is a map of lines and dots.
     So I gave it a try:
   And, it turns out not to be that hard. Try it yourself. Pick another number, other than ten. Try not to look up the answer on Google Images. Post your results.
Post results.

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