Summer Talk Series - Traveling salesman, square packings, and crumpled paper - Matthew Badger

Given an infinite list of cities, how can you (a salesman) decide whether or not it is it possible to travel to each of the cities in finite time (at constant speed)? I will discuss Peter Jones's solution to the 1d traveling salesman problem and how ideas from combinatorics shed light on the 2d traveling salesman problem. This is joint work with Raanan Schul.