Title: Foolin' with Fullerenes
Speaker: Lowell Abrams, GWU
Date and time: Monday, February 27, 4–5 pm
Place: Rome 206
Abstract: A fullerene is an embedding of a cubic graph in the sphere such that all faces are either pentagonal or hexagonal. Dan Slilaty (Wright State University) and I are in the midst of classifying all fullerenes with order-3 rotational symmetry in terms of a concrete construction method involving planar nets. I will describe our work so far, and show how all remaining cases will be resolved by study of triangulations of the disk with certain specific restrictions on vertex degrees.