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18 | College of Saint Benedict Magazine
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n summer 2021, she applied for and got one of three student undergraduate research positions available in the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University Math Department. That meant spending three months immersing herself in achromatic vertex distinguishing edge colorings. Let her explain … “It’s a mouthful,” Fiona says, laughing. “It’s kind of hard to explain. But it’s really taking graphs and coloring the edges so
you get unique colorings around the vertices. Graph theory can be applied to various different things. Graph theorists call it the future of math because it’s so applicable. “They use it in chemistry, physics, city planning, mapping, social networking … that kind of stuff. The specific edge colorings that I did are kind of like an optimization problem which can be useful for anything, really.”
