“THE GAME OF CYCLES”  By Francis Su, Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College

The Game of Cycles, introduced in my book Mathematics for Human Flourishing,
is played on a connected planar graph together with its bounded cells, and players
take turns marking edges with arrows according to a sink source rule that gives the
game a topological flavor. I first started playing this game with Christopher
Jackson, an incarcerated man who is a featured contributor to my book. With Chris
and several other mathematicians, we wrote a paper together about this game, and
I'll share some of the things we discovered.