Does getting an undergrad degree in astronomy and physics, and then a math PhD from UIUC, really count as "blooms late"? Sounds like a fairly standard career path to me.
I would just like to express my gratitude to [Kevin Hartnett](<a href="https://www.wired.com/author/kevin-hartnett/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/author/kevin-hartnett/</a>) for making an enjoyable article that I could almost follow as a quantitatively minded programmer / non-mathematician. It makes sense saying that graphs are somehow a form of matroid. Even without knowing what a matroid is, I get a sense of the importance of spatial relationships.
I majored in math in undergrad, and I always daydreamed about solving difficult mathematical problems despite a lack of formal training. I even had a teacher that I had to "pretend to understand".<p>Seeing a real-world example of this fantasy come true is fascinating. The article was also surprisingly well-written; most mention of higher mathematics in the media is oversimplified to death, but this was an honest and yet approachable presentation of the Rota conjecture (now theorem).<p>By the way, here's another result on chromatic polynomials (proved first by I don't know, but re-discovered by my combinatorics class):<p>Define a "gluing" operation by taking two graphs and connecting them along a common vertex.<p>The chromatic polynomial, h(x), of the new graph, is the product of the chromatic polynomials of the subgraphs over x: h(x) = f(x)*g(x) / x.
As another user pointed out, why should be the chromatic polynomial of rectangle with deleted edge be: q^4 - 3q^3 + 2q^2 and not q * (q - 1)^3. A counter example: when q=2, we have two ways to color the rectangle with a deleted edge. Am I missing something?<p>I think fixating q as the number of possible ways to color the end points of the deleted edge leads to the wrong result.
> his father taught statistics and his mother became one of the first professors of Russian literature in South Korea<p>I notice that really talented people, always have talented parents. Rarely do I read stories about poor blue collar parents producing science wiz. It leads me to believe that genetics play a much bigger role in our intelligence than nurture.
> "Every one of these graphs has a unique chromatic polynomial"<p>This is incorrect. Two different graphs may have the same chromatic polynomial. For example, all trees of N vertices have the same chromatic polynomial: x(x-1)^(N-1)