REPORT FROM KING'S COLLEGE

On February 24, 2000 Daniel Slilaty presented "Connect the Dots, But Don't Cross Your Lines!" to our undergraduate students and faculty. Dan was accompanied by Joe Evan, Veronica Cybulski, Dan Ghezzi, Ben Brewster and Luise-Charlotte Kappe from SUNY- Binghamton. Jim Beuerle from Ursinius College also joined us. The audience primarily consisted of students that are involved in King's Math and Computer Science Club. All of the classes were represented, and a few of our current student teachers were able to join us. Dan's talk consisted of proving that the complete group on five vertices K(5) and the complete bipartite graph K(3,3) are not planar using Euler's formula. He finished the talk with a discussion of Kuratowski's result that every non-planar graph has a subgraph that is isomorphic to a subdivision of K(5) or K(3,3). Our students pointed out that Dan was very enthusiastic about the material and presented it at a level they were able to understand. I should point out that about half of the students in the audience had previously been exposed to these concepts, but they felt they better understood what was really going on after Dan's talk. All of us concurred that Dan did an excellent job in presenting the material.

After Dan's talk, our students were given the opportunity to meet and talk to the graduate students from Binghamton over refreshments. Some of our students asked about graduate school, while others discussed the various math courses taken as undergraduates.

Afterwards, Dr. Louise Berard, Wilkes University, Drs. Tony Berard, Dave Crotty, and Denise Reboli, King's College, joined our visitors from Binghamton and Ursinius for dinner at Chili's. We discussed various issues including the timeline that many of the graduate students must deal with when looking for a job and hoping for job interviews. Tony and I briefly discussed some of our committee responsibilities at a small liberal arts school. All of us renewed connections that have been established at various points in time - two of our visitors graduated from King's, others have ties to some of the faculty. We also discussed some of the graduate students' progress on their own research and look forward to an update the next time we have the opportunity to meet.

Submitted by:
Denise M. Reboli, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
King's College