====== Ryan McCullogh (Binghamton) ======

====== Conservation, Potentials, and the Postman Structure of Graphs ======

===== Abstract for the Combinatorics Seminar 2010 December 13 =====

A notion of "conservativeness", defined for graphs with integrally weighted edges, leads to significant new understanding of the Chinese Postman Problem. A weighted graph is //conservative// if the sum of weights around every cycle is non-negative. (This is different from the normal definition of conservation.) A //potential// is a vertex function that upholds the edge weights in a certain sense. The talk will explain these concepts and present some results about them, all from a paper of Andras Sebo.


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