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What a Math Party Game Tells Us About Graph Theory
- Someone 5y agoFTA: Challenge everyone in your group to shake hands, but only with an odd number of people. Also FTA: Once you shake hands, one of your friends will have an even number of handshakes, and now the game must resume. The observant reader/nitpicking mathematician will notice a subtle difference here. The constraint given isn’t to make an odd number of handshakes, it’s to make handshakes with an odd number of people. The problem as posed is easily solved for any number of people. Just let everybody shake their own hand. That way, everybody shakes hands with one person (twice, but that’s allowed according to the problem description) You can use this example as a lesson to show that, in maths, having precise definitions matter. Does “a graph” allow such self-links? Would it allow multiple links between two nodes?