This award, a Research Planning Grant, supports the work in graph theory of Professor Brigitte Servatius of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Servatius will make use of this award to become more broadly informed in the theory of graphs and the rigidity of graphs. This research falls in the broad category of combinatorics, which is one of the most active fields in today's mathematics. Fundamentally, combinatorics represents a systematization of the very first of all mathematical activities, counting. In its modern development, however, combinatorics has gone beyond just counting to make use of a wide variety of advanced mathematical techniques, and although its roots go back several centuries, the field has had an explosive development in the past few decades because of its importance in communications and information technology. Dr. Servatius's project is especially interdisci- plinary in that it has interactions with both robotics and algebraic geometry.
