Abstract:
During the summer of 2007, I participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates(REU)atIllinoisStateUniversity. Iwasoneofeightundergraduates, all of whom were mathematics education majors. During my eight week experience, we worked with four in-service teachers from the Normal-Bloomington area, as well as math and math education professors from Illinois State and surrounding universities. We discussed several applications of discrete mathematics and did original research, particularly in graph theory. In this article, I will be discussing the Oberwolfach problem, an open problem in graph theory that I spent most of my time working on throughout the REU.