THURSDAY, March 27, 2003
Time: 3:00 - 4:15 PM
Education Building Room 129

Dr. J. Mark Dorrepaal, Chairman
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Old Dominion University

This talk will discuss a scheduling problem which is commonly encountered in round-robin sports tournaments where n teams are required to play their n-1 opponents once at home and once on the road. The challenge is to find the schedule, subject to 4 conditions, which minimizes the number of miles travelled collectively by all n teams. The conditions mirror the constraints that are imposed by Major League Baseball on the schedules which it creates. This talk will define the problem, discuss strategies for determining the solutions to the 4- and 6-team problems, and look ahead to the complexities posed by higher order problems.