MATH 428
Catching Robbers and Spreading Information
Last Offered Spring 2020
Division III Quantative/Formal Reasoning
This course is not offered in the current catalog or this is a previous listing for a current course.

Cops and robbers is a widely studied game played on graphs that has connections to searching algorithms on networks. The cop number of a graph is the smallest number of cops needed to guarantee that the cops can catch a robber in the graph. Similar combinatorial games such as “zero forcing” can be used to model the spread of information. The idea of “throttling” is to spread the information (or catch the robber) as efficiently as possible. This course will survey some of the main results about cops and robbers and the cop number. We will also explore recent research on throttling for cops and robbers, zero forcing, and other variants.