www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/musings.html
Computer Musings I give more-or-less impromptu lectures about 03 times per month at Stanford when I'm in town during the academic year. These lectures are open to the public as well as to students and faculty. No tuition is charged, no attendance is taken, no credit is given. Each talk is independent of the others, and pitched at an audience of non-specialists. Sometimes I talk about difficult technical issues, but I try to minimize the jargon and complications by stressing the motivation and the paradigms and the high-level picture, without sweeping the details entirely under the rug. The next talk in the series will be entitled Spanning Trees and Aspects (The 15th Annual Christmas Tree Lecture) and the date will be Tuesday, December 8, 2009 and the time will be 5:30pm. Please note that this lecture will be held in Skilling Auditorium ---- near Geology Corner ---- instead of in the CS building! The spanning trees of a graph with n vertices are the sets of n-1 edges that connect the graph. In this lecture I'll discuss the remarkable relation between the number of spanning trees and the aspects of the graph, which are defined via matrix theory. For example, I'll explain why the number of spanning trees of an n-dimensional cube is equal to exactly $2^{2^n-n-1} \prod_{k=1}^n k^{n\choose k}$.
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