Scott, Speaking of "Bridges of Koningsberg", I believe that Euler's solution has had an important application in biology. During a series of talks by Leroy Hood at Penn State around 15 years ago, he mentioned a breakthrough by Pavel Pevzner, then Penn State, now UCSD (http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~ppevzner/), in which Pevzner applied the Euler path algorithm to genome sequencing chips. Briefly, the genome is cut up with enzimes, the pieces bind to spots on the surface of a microchip, and finally a computer algorithm is used to work out the original sequence. According to what I remember from the lecture, before Pevzner suggested using Euler paths, people had been using Hamiltonian paths for finding the original sequence.... Pevzner's realization apparently made him a lot of money (from coroperate consultation) and accolades. Pevzner might be be an interesting interview for the article. Doug Bowman
I'm writing an article for an upcoming special issue of Discover magazine (in Dec) devoted to puzzles. The article will be about puzzles that led to new developments in math or science. For example, solving the Bridges of Könisburg led Euler to the development of topology. I prefer examples where the puzzle statement and the solution are accessible to a lay audience, and want to include some examples that have very recent implications...for instance even though Könisburg is an old problem, there might be a recent application of Euler circuits that are newsworthy now. Anyone have any thoughts? -- Scott Kim
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun