Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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A picture of a graph is a collection of points and lines that represent its vertices and edges. What does the space of all pictures of a graph look like topologically? One day, my then-advisor told me I should try to prove that the Poincare polynomial of the picture space can be obtained from the Tutte polynomial of the graph. I eventually succeeded in doing this, but first I had to learn what all those words meant. In this talk, I will talk both about the mathematical result and the problem-solving process. I hope this talk will be accessible even if you don't necessarily know what all those words mean either.