The talk will examine how matrix eigenvalues have important practical and theoretical applications, like winning football pools, or searching the Web, or finding the most important person in a group. I'll discuss these applications and then talk about another recent development that was strongly influenced by eigenvalues, namely the solution to a question that was raised by Eric Weisstein, namely counting acyclic directed graphs.
Penn Undergraduate Mathematics Colloquium
Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - 4:30pm
Herbert Wilf
University of Pennsylvania