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Associate Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin presented a talk titled "Measuring Graph Symmetry with Determining Sets" at the 1st Canadian Discrete and Algorithmic Mathematics Conference in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Boutin's work focuses on finding a smallest set of nodes that captures all the symmetries in a network. In this talk Boutin gave upper and lower bounds on the size of such a set when the network is presented with a particular decomposition.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin recently published a research article "Structure and Properties of Locally Outerplanar Graphs" in the Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing. Boutin's paper investigates graphs (network diagrams) that can be drawn in the plane with their vertices on a circle and which contain no short self-intersecting path.

Debra Boutin, associate professor of mathematics, has published "Using determining sets to distinguish Kneser graphs," co-authored with Michael Albertson, in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. This paper establishes the distinguishing number of each graph in a well-known family called Kneser graphs. The paper proves that (with only one notable exception) every Kneser graph can have its vertices colored with one of two colors in such a way that the resulting colored graph has no symmetry. The  proof was accomplished using the determining sets that Boutin defined and studied in a previous research article.