Generator

A matching that covers all 5 of one side

A generator in the discrete library, called 11 times across 6 essays. Below: what it draws at its defaults and at each mode an essay asks for, what it checks while drawing, and everywhere it is used.

bipartite is one function. Everything below came out of it during this build, at parameters taken from the essays rather than invented for this page — so a figure here is the same figure a reader meets in an essay, and if the generator changes, this page changes with it.

At its defaults

A matching that covers all 5 of one side. A bipartite graph with every possible pairing drawn thin and one complete matching drawn thick, so that each vertex on the left is joined to a distinct vertex on the right.

show: "hall"

3 applicants who between them can fill only 2 posts. A bipartite graph with no complete matching, and the set of vertices responsible: several on the left whose neighbours between them are fewer in number than they are.

show: "regular"

A 3-regular bipartite graph split into 3 matchings. A bipartite graph in which every vertex has 3 edges, with its edges coloured so that each colour class is a complete matching.

show: "deficiency"

Matching shortfall against worst overshoot, on three graphs. A table of three bipartite graphs, each with the size of its largest matching, the set of vertices with the fewest neighbours relative to its size, and the two numbers that agree.

What it checks while it draws

Collected by running the family and recording what it asserted, not written here. The count is how many separate times the claim was put to the test while these drawings were made.

Where it is called

Changing this generator changes every figure on this list. That is what makes the list worth publishing rather than keeping in a check script.

Applied

A lottery over whole assignments

A table of shares in which every person's shares add to one task and every task is exactly covered is never anything more than a mixture of whole assignments — and finding the mixture is a matter of taking one complete assignment out at a time.

Computation

Nine thousand four hundred and eight

There are four Latin squares of order four once the first row and column are fixed, fifty-six of order five, and nine thousand four hundred and eight of order six. The exact answer is known for eleven orders and for no more — and yet a half-finished square can always be finished.

Discrete

One bottleneck and nothing else

A set of jobs can be filled by distinct people unless some group of jobs has too few candidates between them — and that single obstruction is the only one there is, which is what makes the theorem worth having.

Discrete

The bottleneck is the whole story

However much a network can carry from one place to another, there is a way of cutting it in two whose total capacity is exactly that number. One quantity is a maximum over ways of routing and the other a minimum over ways of severing, and they are never off by even one.

Discrete

The edge that forces a triangle

A graph on six points can carry nine edges with no three of them closing a triangle. It cannot carry ten. The bound is n²/4, the graphs that achieve it are all the same shape, and both facts fall out of examining every graph there is.

Algebra

The same sum without its minus signs

Delete the signs from the determinant's sum over permutations and what is left counts things directly rather than by cancellation. It is a better count and a far worse object — because the cancellation was what made the determinant computable.

The whole library · What the figures prove