Why is graph labeling a good topic for undergraduate student research?
There are many accessible problems that don’t require years of advanced study to understand. A week of reading and trying examples leaves a student ready to tackle his/her own problems. Problems seem to lend themselves to different approaches from combinatorial reasoning (often nothing more than fancy “counting”), to good old-fashioned ingenuity and creativity. There is some room for writing computer code to generate examples and check conjectures. Analysis of what can and can’t be done with a computer may also be a fruitful area for student investigation.
