This award supports the research in Graph Theory of Professor Edward Schmeichel of San Jose State University. Dr. Schmeichel will investigate the structure of graphs by examining the length of the longest cycle that a graph may contain, and by studying the algorithmic complexity of various problems on graphs and networks. The beginnings of Graph Theory go back perhaps two hundred years, but it is mostly in the last half-century that the field has become an active, fertile, and flourishing branch of mathematics. A graph is a network of lines ("edges") joining points ("vertices"), and the uses of Graph Theory abound not only in the field of Communications Theory but in surprisingly many parts of Mathematics, both pure and applied, as well as Theoretical Computer Science.
