Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

Graphs of Combinatorial Structures:
Worth a billion or a trillion abstractions?
Abstract: "A picture is worth a thousand words" or so a Chinese saying goes. What if the picture is that of a graph of a combinatorial structure embedded on a surface? What is it worth? Topological graph theorists think a lot. In this talk we will try to show the fascinating interaction between combinatorial structures and their realization on surfaces. We will talk of a collage of embeddings of common combinatorial structures such as: groups, fields, hypergraphs, block designs and finite geometries on orientable surfaces.