astronomy

William Lawrence Kocay

William Lawrence Kocay is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand William Lawrence Kocay rather than just read about it. In short: William Lawrence Kocay is a Canadian professor at the department of computer science at St. Paul's College of the University of Manitoba and a graph theorist.

Key takeaways

William Lawrence Kocay belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect William Lawrence Kocay to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of William Lawrence Kocay from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

William Lawrence Kocay is a Canadian professor at the department of computer science at St. Paul's College of the University of Manitoba and a graph theorist. He is known for his work in graph algorithms and the reconstruction conjecture and is affectionately referred to as "Wild Bill" by his students. Bill Kocay is a former managing editor (from Jan 1988 to May 1997) of Ars Combinatoria, a Canadian journal of combinatorial mathematics, is a founding fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications. His research interests include algorithms for graphs, the development of mathematical software, the graph reconstruction problem, the graph isomorphism problem, projective geometry, Hamiltonian cycles, planarity, graph embedding algorithms, graphs on surfaces, and combinatorial designs.

Publications Some new methods in reconstruction theory, W. L. Kocay – Combinatorial mathematics, IX (Brisbane, 1981), LNM Some NP-complete problems for hypergraph degree sequences, CJ Colbourn, WL Kocay, DR Stinson – Discrete Applied Mathematics, 1986 – portal.acm.org

Books and software package Graphs, algorithms, and optimization By William Kocay, Donald L. Kreher, Published 2004, CRC Press, 483 pages Groups and graphs – A mainly Mac OS X software package for graphs, digraphs, combinatorial designs, projective configurations, polyhedra, graph embeddings in the torus and projective plane, and automorphism groups. It also constructs fractals. Archived 2018-04-06 at the Wayback Machine

See also List of University of Waterloo people

References

William Lawrence Kocay's homepage Archived 2009-02-03 at the Wayback Machine William Lawrence Kocay at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with William Lawrence Kocay

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what William Lawrence Kocay claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to William Lawrence Kocay before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about William Lawrence Kocay ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of William Lawrence Kocay

In research: William Lawrence Kocay appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses William Lawrence Kocay in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: William Lawrence Kocay is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Academic staff of the University of Manitoba, American computer scientists, Canadian academic biography stubs, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for William Lawrence Kocay outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study William Lawrence Kocay in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what William Lawrence Kocay means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain William Lawrence Kocay out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is William Lawrence Kocay in simple terms?

William Lawrence Kocay is a Canadian professor at the department of computer science at St. Paul's College of the University of Manitoba and a graph theorist.

Why does William Lawrence Kocay matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study William Lawrence Kocay?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on William Lawrence Kocay.