Road Coloring Problem Solved

ArieKremen writes "Israeli Avraham Trakhtman, a Russian immigrant mathematician who had been employed as a night watchman, has solved the Road Coloring problem. First posed in 1970 by Benjamin Weiss and Roy Adler, the problem posits that given a finite number of roads, one should be able to draw a map, coded in various colors, that leads to a certain destination regardless of the point of origin. The 63-year-old Trakhtman jotted down the solution in pencil in 8 pages. The problem has real-world implementation in message and traffic routing."

Comments

Night Watchman?

[ePhil_One]

The guy was an accomplished Russian Mathmetician before he emmigrated from Russia 15 years ago.

Personally, I'm not surprised he's Russian, Mathemetics has seemed to be a strong point in that country, since their computers lagged behind us they had to make it up w/ mathmatical ingenuity.

Re:Night Watchman?

[flyingsquid]

According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], he is a mathematician at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Here is his homepage [biu.ac.il] hosted by the university. Maybe he was a night watchman, but it looks to me like he's a professor now...

No surprise. I mean, have you tried pronouncing his name? It sounds almost exactly like "Tractorman". That's a hell of an advantage in life. Just imagine if everywhere you went, people introduced you as "Tractorman" and you introduced yourself saying, "Pleased to meet you, I'm Tractorman"? I mean, people would be blown away by the sheer awesomeness of you being named "Tractorman". I mean, you've got to really have a pair to sign that name to your checks. And you'd have offers of tenure rolling in from all over the place, just so the president of the university could say with proud authority, "Sure, maybe Princeton has Fefferman at their math department. But our department has Tractorman."