Computer Science and Discrete Mathematics (CSDM)

In its simplest form, the central limit theorem states that a sum of n independent random variables can be approximated with error \(O(n^{-1/2})\) by a Gaussian with matching mean and second moment (given these variables are not too dissimilar). We...

Consider an image with two colors--black and white--and where only 1% of the pixels are white. If we apply a Gaussian blur, can it be that the non-black pixels of the (now greyscale) image are largely concentrated on a single shade of grey? Sure...

The signrank of an \(N \times N\) matrix \(A\) of signs is the minimum possible rank of a real matrix \(B\) in which every entry has the same sign as the corresponding entry of \(A\). The VC-dimension of \(A\) is the maximum cardinality of a set of...

We introduce a new method of obtaining sharp estimates on mixing for Glauber dynamics for the Ising model, which, in particular, establishes cutoff in three dimensions up to criticality. The new framework, which considers ``information percolation''...

In profoundly influential works, Shannon and Huffman show that if Alice wants to send a message \(X\) to Bob, it's sufficient for her to send roughly \(H(X)\) bits (in expectation), where \(H\) denotes Shannon's entropy function. In other words, the...

Computing the volume of a convex body in n-dimensional space is an ancient, basic and difficult problem (#P-hard for explicit polytopes and exponential lower bounds for deterministic algorithms in the oracle model). We present a new algorithm, whose...

Monotone submodular maximization over a matroid (MSMM) is a fundamental optimization problem generalizing Maximum Coverage and MAX-SAT. Maximum Coverage is NP-hard to approximate better than \(1-1/e\), an approximation ratio obtained by the greedy...

In distributed systems, communication between the participants in the computation is usually the most expensive part of the computation. Theoretical models of distributed systems usually reflect this by neglecting the cost of local computation, and...

Let \(G\) be a finite group, and let \(a\), \(b\), \(c\),... be independent random elements of \(G\), chosen at uniform distribution. What is the distribution of the element obtained by a fixed word in the letters \(a\), \(b\), \(c\),..., such as \...

Two important breakthroughs on the permanent had been accomplished in 1998: A. Schrijver proved Schrijver-Valiant Conjecture on the minimal exponential growth of the number of perfect matchings in k-regular bipartite graphs with multiple edges; N...