The King In The Car Park
How Graph Theory Helped Discover a King of England
One morning in August 2012 in a car park in Leicester in the English midlands, a mechanical digger was starting to cut into the concrete surface. A number of interested spectators were present, hoping against hope that something amazing but highly improbable might occur.
Some rugged detective work had led a group of amateur and professional historians to believe that this may be the area where Richard III — the stooped, crooked-backed English king who met a brutal end at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 — had been unceremoniously dumped over 500 years ago. Bolstered by donations and crowdfunding, they raised enough money and gained approval for a limited archaeological dig in the car park of the local council building. They were excited beyond measure. Everyone else, including the academic and professional archaeologists present, were sceptical.
The first cut was made in an area of the car park marked with a mysterious-looking letter R. Presumably this indicated that the parking space was reserved for someone important, but in truth, nobody could explain why that R was there and what it meant.
Within hours, immediately below that letter R, they found a skeleton with a crooked back.
