Computer Science and Discrete Mathematics (CSDM)

We prove that a uniformly chosen proper coloring of Z_{2n}^d with 3 colors has a very rigid structure when the dimension d is sufficiently high. The coloring takes one color on almost all of either the even or the odd sub-lattice. In particular, one...

A pseudo-random graph is a graph G resembling a typical random graph of the same edge density. Pseudo-random graphs are expected naturally to share many properties of their random counterparts. In particular, many of their enumerative properties...

math.ias.edu/files/seminars/KahnAbst.pdf

The notion of exactly (or approximately) representing certain combinatorial properties of a graph $G$ on a simpler graph is ubiquitous in combinatorial optimization. In this talk, I will introduce the notion of vertex sparsification. Here we are...

A long-standing line of work in economic theory has studied models by which a group of people in a social network, each holding a numerical opinion, can arrive at a shared opinion through repeated averaging with their neighbors in the network...

Avi Wigderson, Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics, gave a Friends Forum in October 2011, entitled Randomness and Pseudo-randomness. Is the universe inherently deterministic or probabilistic? Perhaps more importantly, can we tell...

We show existence of rigid combinatorial objects that previously were not known to exist. Specifically, we consider two families of objects:

1. A family of permutations on n elements is t-wise independent if it acts uniformly on tuples of t elements...

We define a polynomial threshold function to be a function of the form f(x) = sgn(p(x)) for p a polynomial. We discuss some recent techniques for dealing with polynomial threshold functions, particular when evaluated on random Gaussians. We...

It is well-known that any Boolean function f:{-1,+1}^n \to {-1,+1} can be written uniquely as a polynomial f(x) = \sum_{S subset [n]} f_s \prod_{i in S} x_i. The collection of coefficients (f_S's) this expression are referred to (with good reason)...

Let H be a fixed graph with h vertices. The graph removal lemma states that every graph on n vertices with o(nh) copies of H can be made H-free by removing o(n2) edges. We give a new proof which avoids Szemeredi's regularity lemma and...