Fall 2017 Student Discrete Analysis Seminar

Meetings: Tuesdays 5-7pm, 959 Evans Hall.

This is a student reading group for topics not far from the convex hull of: the analytic theory of polynomials, spectral graph theory, discrete probability, combinatorics, algorithms, and random matrices.

Schedule

Date Speaker Topic
9/5 Nikhil Bansal
2pm, second floor of Simons
Algorithmic Banaszczyk Theorem
9/12 Archit Approximation Alg for Permanent of PSD Matrices
9/19 Satyaki Stein's method, after Chatterjee's Thesis
9/26 Soumendu Jerrum-Sinclair-Vigoda
10/3 Theo Jerrum-Sinclair-Vigoda cont'd
10/10 Nick Helton-Vinnikov, Spectral Factorization
10/17 Jonathan Branden, Obstructions to determinantal representability
10/24 Jess The Lovasz Theta Function for Random Regular Graphs, [arxiv]
10/31 Soumendu The Method of Moments
11/7 Aaron Random Spanning Trees
11/14 No seminar, MSRI talk at 3:30 Matrix Valued Log-concave Functions
11/21 Nick Lowerbounds for Spectrahedral Representations of Hyperbolicity Cones
11/28 no seminar