Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin recently published a research article titled "The thickness and chromatic number of r-inflated graphs" in Discrete Mathematics. In this paper, Boutin and her co-authors Michael Albertson (late of Smith College) and Ellen Gethner (University of Colorado, Denver) introduce their work on networks that are inflated by replacing each vertex in by a set of r mutually connected vertices and replacing each edge between a pair of vertices with all edges between the associated 2r vertices.
