Vašek Chvátal

Visiting Professor
Department of Applied Mathematics (KAM)
Charles University
Email:     c h v a t a l (at) k a m (dot) m f f (dot) c u n i (dot) c z
Front page at Concordia 		                                                                                                           

The Discrete Mathematical Charms of Paul Erdős (also at Megabooks and at Amazon)

Here is this book's preface, here is a recording of its launch, and here are its errata, and here are its reviews from MathSciNet, from The Mathematical Gazette, from the Zentralblatt, from the Notices of the AMS.
Association of American Publishers has selected it as a finalist of its 2022 PROSE (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) Awards in the Mathematics category. Its Japanese translation appeared in 2023.

Teaching

Everybody who is incapable of learning
has taken to teaching.

Oscar Wilde (1854 -- 1900)
The Decay of Lying , p.3

Research

My initial research interests were in graph theory (with an emphasis on hamiltonian cycles and later on perfect graphs) and in combinatorics (with an emphasis on extremal problems). Then they extended to analysis of algorithms (with an emphasis on cutting-plane proofs) and to operations research (with an emphasis on linear programming). Between 1988 and 2005, I was mostly preoccupied by the traveling salesman problem. In December 2004, I began learning about EEG recordings of epileptic seizures. Eventually, this resulted in a joint paper on the relationship between McCulloch-Pitts brains and pseudorandom functions.

Right now I am most interested in the possibility of generalizing the geometrical De Bruijn-Erdős theorem to finite metric spaces .

Here are my list of publications with a few links to related web pages, and slides for my talks.

Des chercheurs qui cherchent, on en trouve.
Des chercheurs qui trouvent, on en cherche.

Attributed to Charles de Gaulle (1890 -- 1970)

Photos

This and that