Talks

Here are slides from some of our talks related to this subject
  • SeparationNumbersEKU.pdf : I gave a colloquium talk to the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Eastern Kentucky University on September 29, 2006. [Note: In this talk I stated that in 1910 Ahrens gave the first proof of the existence of n-queens solutions for all n>3.  Actually, as stated in the survey by Bell and Stevens, E. Pauls published the first proof in 1874.]
  • tenn_pres.ppt and finalcap.ppt : Matthew Wolff's talks, the first was given at the 19th Annual Cumberland Conference and the second was his senior capstone presentation. These presentations discuss how we used Knuth's Dancing Links algorithm to develop a faster parallel program for counting the number of  solutions to the N+k Queens Problem. (Note: The files are in MS-PowerPoint format.)
  • WahleSUMS.ppt: On October 13, 2007, Nick Wahle gave a talk at the Shenandoah Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics Conference on transit graphs, a generalization of chessboard graphs.  This file is in MS-PowerPoint format.
  • HuffordSUMS.ppt: On October 13, 2007, Casey Hufford gave a talk at the SUMS conference on book embeddings of chessboard graphs with some results on the effect of placing a pawn on the board..  This file is in MS-PowerPoint format.
  • MillerMCCC.ppt: On October 13, 2007 (apparently a busy day for us), John Miller gave a talk at The Twenty-first Midwest Conference on Combinatorics, Cryptography and Computing comparing the performance of algorithms that count the number of solutions to the N+k Queens problem. This file is in MS-PowerPoint format.
  • Reflections.ppt: I gave a talk on August 1, 2008 at the MAA MathFest in Madison, Wisconsin on symmetric solutions to the N+k Queens problem. This file is in MS-Powerpoint format.
  • chatham_centro_queens.pdf: On August 6, 2011, I gave a talk at the MAA MathFest in Lexington,Kentucky reporting further progress on solutions with various sorts of symmetry.
  • KYMAA_2013_final_v2.pptx: Our students have been trying to build a nicer-looking set of solutions.  This presentation was given at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Kentucky Section of the Mathematical Association of America, and an undergraduate math conference at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • n-k-queensmoves13.pdf:  In our other talks and papers, we have assumed that pawns block attacks.  In this talk for the inaugural MOVES conference in New York City, we explore what happens when pawns do not block attacks.
  • maximum-queens-problem.pdf: In her 1998 CUNY Ph. D. dissertation, Zhao asked how many queens you could put on the board if you could put as many pawns as needed on that board.  In this talk at the 2015 Kentucky MAA Annual Meeting, I answer that question.
  • maxqueensmovestalk.pdf: At the 2015 MOVES conference, I spoke some more about the "maximum queens problem".  I also distributed a handout:  queenspawnsmoves2015handout.pdf 
  • the__n_k__dragon_kings_problem_cumberland.pdf: A dragon king is a shogi piece that can move any number of spaces vertically or horizontally or one space diagonally.  At the 30th Annual Cumberland Conference, held at Marshall University in May 2018, I talked about the problem of placing n+k dragon kings and k pawns on an n-by-n board so that no two dragon kings attack each other.
  • knight_free_capacities_of_m_x_n_chessboards.pdf "How Many Mutually Non-attacking, Non-knight Pieces Can We Place on an M-by-N Chessboard?", a talk given in the Recreational Mathematics Contributed Paper Session of the 2024 MAA MathFest in Indianapolis, Indiana.