Games and Graph 

Mathematics is not a spectator sport. It's not a body of knowledge, it's not symbols on a page. It's something you play with, something you do.

(Keith Devlin) 

People think that mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit, it’s the stuff we CAN understand. It’s cats that are complicated. 

(John H. Conway)

Following the above-stated theme, myself with Dr. Haniya Azam decided to expose young school kids to "Graphs and Games" in the LUMS MATH CIRCLE held on January 07, 2022. It was intended to involve our participants in devising puzzles and building winning strategies. All the participants were grouped in pairs, where, sometimes they worked as a team to build winning strategies of Nim-games and other time playing against each other. Participants learned various sophisticated applications of graphs in a playful manner. The duo-mode of instructions made things very interactive, and they learned to solve puzzles and games by graph theory.

Excitingly, they learned coloring of graphs as a fun game that they further applied to practical problems like smart scheduling and converting maps to graphs. They themselves discovered the well-known 4-color problem, in graph theory. Participants were exposed to the historic "Konigsberg bridge problem" that gave birth to the underlined subject "graph theory" and many related theories developed by L. Euler.  

Here are some highlights from the event:

For more pictures visit our Facebook page.

Instructors: