Combinatorial rigidity and … unfolding robot arms?

This week our speaker is Stephen Oloo. His talk “Combinatorial rigidity and … unfolding robot arms?”  will be 5:30 on Wednesday in LGRT 1634. Pizza and soda will be served!

Abstract:
In this talk we will use our intuitive, physical understanding of rigidity
to define, mathematically, what it means for a graph to be rigid. We will
then examine the link between the rigidity of a graph and the number of
vertices and edges it contains (running into some high level maths along
the way). Finally we will see how these ideas can be used to prove some
cool theorems.
Don’t know what a graph is? Don’t like the sound of the word combinatorial?
Have no fear; all will be explained.