7Bridges, what's in a name?

The Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler laid the foundations for the mathematical field of graph theory in 1736, when he answered the question if it would be possible to visit all four land sections of central Königsberg by crossing all seven bridges only once.

The river Pregel divides the landmasses of the centre of the town into four pieces: a left bank, a right bank, and two islands. Euler abstracted the problem into a graph. Each land mass is a node, and each bridge a connection.

The answer to the question is obvious when you draw the abstracted nodes and their relationships: you cannot start at any node, cross all relationships only once and visit all nodes.

Fig. 1. Map of Königsberg with the seven bridges and the abstracted graph. (Image taken from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg)

The abstract graph forms the basis of the 7Bridges.Consulting logo, which preserves the topology of the original problem. 

Thinking about the seven-bridges problem as a graph laid the foundations for graph theory. Nearly 300 years of advances in mathematics today results in powerful graph algorithms which can solve everyday problems in unique ways. Today, we can build graphs with billions of nodes and connections and query them near real time.

Graph algorithms are powerful solutions for, e.g., fraud detection, recommendations, or context-aware searching using knowledge graphs.

7Bridges.Consulting focuses on solving problems using graphs and graph algorithms.