The outline for the talk on Thursday and Friday on the topic of minimum
weight spanning tree algorithms is below.

The Friday talk will be at 2:00 in room 137. 

People can go over pages 296-303 in the text book "Randomized Algorithms" 
to prepare for this topic. 

Thursday: Talk given by Hanwen Wu
1. Background
2. Problem Definition
3. Properties of Minimum Spanning Trees
4. deterministic Algorithm: Kruskal's
5. Deterministic Algorithm: Boruvka's
6. Heavy Edges and MST verification
7. Application and Examples

Friday: Talk given by Nabeel Akhtar
1. Brief background - Minimum Spanning Tree and Minimum Spanning Forest
2. Properties and their proofs
3. Brief overview of the deterministic algorithm 
4. Randomized linear-time algorithm for finding minimum spanning tree
5. Analysis of the randomized algorithm
6. Brief overview of other randomized algorithms / Applications of MST.

References: 
Paper: A Randomized Linear Time Algorithm to find Minimum Spanning Tree
Book 'Randomized Algorithm, R. Motwani and P. Raghavan' Page: 296-303