Macalester scholar to give Distinguished Scientist Lecture
"Some Uses of Color in Discrete Mathematics" is the title of the next Distinguished Scientist Lecture at Skidmore, to be presented by Joan P. Hutchinson on Thursday, Oct. 14, in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.
Free and open to the public, the talk will begin at 5:30 p.m. The program is co-sponsored by the NSF ADVANCE: Skidmore and Union College Network Project.
Hutchinson, who taught in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Macalester College, is an expert in graph coloring, an area of mathematics with a wide range of fascinating applications. Her talk, which will be accessible to a broad audience, will survey some of the places in which this field is useful, including such topics as how to color a map with as few colors as possible, how to design magic squares, and how to position guards in an art gallery.
Hutchinson's web page notes that she has "retired from teaching, but not from math." Her specialties include combinatorial analysis, graph theory, graph algorithms, and graph drawing. She is a summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Smith College (B.A.) who earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at University of Pennsylvania.
The NSF ADVANCE project is a three-year study by Skidmore and Union College researchers on recruiting and retaining female professors in the fields of science (including social science), technology, engineering and math?the STEM disciplines. A $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation supports the project.
