Mathematical Research Seminar - Archive
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In 2017 we have been hearing a lot about blockchain, in 2018 a bit less. But what is a blockchain, really? How is it connected to Bitcoin? Why is there the "crypto" in "cryptocurrencies"? And should we, as mathematicians, be even interested in it? We will be talking about these and similar questions during the seminar. We will briefly look at what kind of mathematics a usual blockchain is based on, how it started, and in what ways today's world is trying to use it.
In this talk we present an algorithm for computing the Wiener index of a tree from the distance matrix of its leaves, known also as the terminal matrix of a tree. The algorithm performs better than the linear time algorithm for trees that have a large number of vertices of valence 2.