I don't think graph theory is in any danger of being lost. That seems overly dramatic.
The Brits and Japanese had no idea of the underlying mechanisms, and our society has the underlying comp sci knowledge in our case, archived in libraries. If an entire generation of computer science grads just fluffs graph theory, it's not like the knowledge will be lost, but it's definitely not a good thing. It's definitely a step in the wrong direction.
However, it was not graph theory which was lost. It's a body of engineering knowledge for how to do applied graph theory; how to recognize you have to deal with graph theory, then quickly clobber the problem with several broadly applicable tools. Why isn't this being passed down from one generation of profs and TAs to the next?
Since people can learn from each other, it's hard to say what people really need to know the day they join the team.
It's one thing to know a high level overview about something, then to be able to go and bone up on a specific area. It's another thing if someone doesn't know enough to recognize the thing without prompting and clearly has no practice solving problems of that general category, whatsoever.
EDIT: Isn't anyone curious about what these tools are?
The Brits and Japanese had no idea of the underlying mechanisms, and our society has the underlying comp sci knowledge in our case, archived in libraries. If an entire generation of computer science grads just fluffs graph theory, it's not like the knowledge will be lost, but it's definitely not a good thing. It's definitely a step in the wrong direction.
However, it was not graph theory which was lost. It's a body of engineering knowledge for how to do applied graph theory; how to recognize you have to deal with graph theory, then quickly clobber the problem with several broadly applicable tools. Why isn't this being passed down from one generation of profs and TAs to the next?
Since people can learn from each other, it's hard to say what people really need to know the day they join the team.
It's one thing to know a high level overview about something, then to be able to go and bone up on a specific area. It's another thing if someone doesn't know enough to recognize the thing without prompting and clearly has no practice solving problems of that general category, whatsoever.
EDIT: Isn't anyone curious about what these tools are?