The Game of Cycles

2023 Gentry Lecturer
Francis Edward Su, Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College

April 14, 2023, 11:00 am
016 Manchester Hall

The Game of Cycles: The Game of Cycles, introduced in my book Mathematics for Human Flourishing, is played on a connected planar graph together with its bounded cells, and players take turns marking edges with arrows according to a sink source rule that gives the game a topological flavor. I first started playing this game with Christopher Jackson, an incarcerated man who is a featured contributor to my book. With Chris and several other mathematicians, we wrote a paper together about this game, and I’ll share some of the things we discovered.

Bio: Francis Edward Su is the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and a former president of the Mathematical Association of America. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research is in geometric combinatorics and applications to the social sciences and he has co-authored numerous papers with undergraduates. He also has a passion for teaching and popularizing mathematics. From the Mathematical Association of America, he received the 2013 Haimo Award for distinguished teaching and the 2018 Halmos-Ford Award for his writing. His work has been featured in Quanta Magazine, Wired, and The New York Times. His book Mathematics for Human Flourishing (Yale University Press, 2020) won the 2021 Euler Book Prize. It is an inclusive vision of what math is, who it’s for, and why anyone should learn it.