====== Marcelo Aguiar (Cornell) ======

====== The Ring of Graphs and the Chromatic Polynomial ======

===== Abstract for the Combinatorics Seminar 2014 February 25 =====

Certain basic operations between graphs resemble addition and multiplication of ordinary numbers. Formally, the species of graphs is a ring in an appropriate category. We explain this fact and employ it to obtain a novel understanding and a wide generalization of the chromatic polynomial (and the corresponding symmetric function of Stanley) in terms of ring theory.


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