Tuesday, February 28, 2006
As a graduate student of Professor Christopher Godsil, University of Waterloo, Michael Newman wrote an outstanding dissertation which presents extensions and applications of the Delsarte-Hoffman bound on the size of independent sets in graphs. The thesis interweaves the solutions of three intriguing yet ostensibly unrelated problems into a unified tapestry by virtue of their common methodological treatment. The results obtained are important and the exposition first-rate.