organizer Nicolas Macris
office INR 134
phone 38114
email [email protected]
meetings: mondays 12h15 – 13h15 in room INR 113
Topic
This semester we will study the “probabilistic method” through a selection of special topics and examples from the two books:
“Ten Lectures on the Probabilistic Method”, by Joel Spencer
“The Probabilistic Method”, by Noga Alon and Joel Spencer
The method can be briefly described as follows: to prove the existence of certain combinatorial structures one constructs an appropriate probability space and shows that a randomly chosen element has the desired property with positive probability. This kind of ideas, initialy introduced by Erdos, have become a powerful tool in combinatorics, discrete mathematics, computer science.
We will meet on a weekly basis for presentations of 1h between 12h15 and 13h15, starting on monday march 19. Participants are encouraged to bring their lunch.
Evolving schedule
| speaker | date | topic | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shrinivas Kudekar | March 19 | Ramsey numbers | ||
| Amin Karbasi | March 26 | Lovasz local lemma | ||
| Jeremie Ezri | April 2 | Janson inequalities | ||
| — | April 9 | easter holiday | ||
| Jeremie Ezri | April 16 | applications of Janson inequalities | ||
| Iryna Andriyanova | April 23 | concentration, martingales | ||
| Satish Korada | April 30 | Talagrand inequality | ||
| Satish Korada | May 7 | Talagrand continued | ||
| Mahdi Cheraghchi | May 14 | evolution of random graphs | ||
| Mahdi Cheraghchi | May 21 | evolution of random graphs cont | ||
| — | May 28 | holiday | ||
| Shrinivas Kudekar | June 4 | zero-one laws | ||
| — | June 11 | — |