Tutte Colloquium - Graham Farr

Title: The history of Tutte-Whitney polynomials

Abstract: The Tutte-Whitney polynomial of a graph is a two-variable polynomial that contains a lot of interesting information about the graph.  It includes, for example, the chromatic, flow and reliability polynomials of a graph, the Ising and Potts model partition functions of statistical mechanics, the weight enumerator of a linear code, and the Jones polynomial of an alternating link.

We describe the early history of Tutte-Whitney polynomials, especially the contributions of the early papers of Whitney and Tutte.