1.

Six senators A,B,C,D,E F are members of five committees, the

memberships
being {B,C,D}, {A,E, F}, {A,B,E,F}, {A,B,D, F} and {A,B,C}. The
activities of each committee are to be reviewed by a senator who is
not on that committee. Can five distinct senators be selected from the
six? How?

2. Teachers in a school have been asked to nominate, from those

students known to them, three students each as candidates for the
school council. At least one student nominated by each teacher is to be
in Year 12. No student may be nominated by more than one teacher.
Describe how the problem of determining whether or not it is possible
for all teachers to nominate students as required may be expressed as
(a) a matching problem in a bipartite graph, (b) a transport network
problem.

Solution: (a) Take a bipartite graph {X,Y} as follows. The X vertices

consist of three copies of each teacher, one whose “job" it is to seek a
Year 12 student, the other two whose “job" it is to seek one student
each, not necessarily Year 12. The Y vertices represent the students
(one for each student). The edges are formed by joining each X vertex
representing a seeker of a Year 12 student to all the Year 12 students
he or she knows, and each seeker of a not-necessarily-Year 12 student
to all the students he or she knows (Year 12 or not).
A complete matching X to Y in this graph corresponds to a solution of
the problem of finding the three students for each teacher, and
whether a complete matching exists depends on whether or not the
conditions of Hall's Matching theorem are satisfied.

(b) Take a bipartite graph {X,Y} as follows. The X vertices consist of

two copies of each teacher, one whose “job" it is to seek a Year 12
student, the other whose “job" it is to seek two students, not
necessarily Year 12. The Y vertices represent the students (one for
each student). The edges are formed by joining each X vertex
representing a seeker of a Year 12 student to all the Year 12 student
he or she knows, and each seeker of two not-necessarily-Year 12
students to all the students he or she knows (Year 12 or not).
Add a source a joined to each X vertex, and a sink z joined to each Y
vertex.
Take the capacities of the edges from a to each seeker of a Year 12
student to be 1, and from a to each seeker of two not-necessarily-Year
12 students to be 2.
Take the capacities of all X to Y edges to be 1, and the capacities of all
Y to z
edges to be 1 (reflecting the requirement that each student can be
nominated
by at most one teacher). Assume all edges are directed from a to X,
from X
to Y , and from Y to z. Then each teacher can nominate 3 students,
including at least one Year 12 one, if and only if this transport network
has a maximal flow of
3|X| / 2, the corresponding minimal cut being {a| the rest}.