Seminars and Colloquia by Series

First-order properties of Erdos-Renyi random graphs

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - 13:35 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Maksim Zhukovskii MIPT, Moscow, Russia
In the talk, an asymptotic behaviour of first order properties of the Erdos-Renyi random graph G(n,p) will be considered. The random graph obeys the zero-one law if for each first-order property L either its probability tends to 0 or tends to 1. The random graph obeys the zero-one k-law if for each property L which can be expressed by first-order formula with quantifier depth at most k either its probability tends to 0 or tends to 1. Zero-one laws were proved for different classes of functions p=p(n). The class n^{-a} is at the top of interest. In 1988 S. Shelah and J.H. Spencer proved that the random graph G(n,n^{-a}) obeys zero-one law if a is positive and irrational. If a is rational from the interval (0,1], then G(n,n^{-a}) does not obey the zero-one law. I obtain zero-one k-laws for some rational a from (0,1]. For any first-order property L let us consider the set S(L) of a from (0,1) such that a probability of G(n,n^{-a}) to satisfy L does not converges or its limit is not zero or one. Spencer proved that there exists L such that S(L) is infinite. Recently in the joint work with Spencer we obtain new results on a distribution of elements of S(L) and its limit points.

The Range of the Rotor Walk

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - 13:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Laura FlorescuCourant Institute, NYU
In a "rotor walk" the exits from each vertex follow a prescribed periodic sequence. On an infinite Eulerian graph embedded periodically in $\R^d$, we show that any simple rotor walk, regardless of rotor mechanism or initial rotor configuration, visits at least on the order of t^{d/(d+1)} distinct sites in t steps. We prove a shape theorem for the rotor walk on the comb graph with i.i.d.\ uniform initial rotors, showing that the range is of order t^{2/3} and the asymptotic shape of the range is a diamond. Using a connection to the mirror model and critical percolation, we show that rotor walk with i.i.d. uniform initial rotors is recurrent on two different directed graphs obtained by orienting the edges of the square grid, the Manhattan lattice and the F-lattice. Joint work with Lionel Levine and Yuval Peres.

Group actions on spanning trees

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - 13:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Matt BakerGeorgia Tech
The Jacobian group Jac(G) of a finite graph G is a finite abelian group whose cardinality is the number of spanning trees of G. It is natural to wonder whether there is a canonical simply transitive action of Jac(G) on the set of spanning trees which "explains" this numerical coincidence. Surprisingly, this turns out to be related to topological embeddings: we will explain a certain precise sense in which the answer is yes if and only if G is planar. We will also explain how tropical geometry sheds an interesting new light on this picture.

Perfect Matchings in Dense Uniform Hypergraphs

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - 13:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Jie HanGeorgia State University
In graph/hypergraph theory, perfect matchings are fundamental objects of study. Unlike the graph case, perfect matchings in hypergraphs have not been well understood yet. It is quite natural and desirable to extend the classical theory on perfect matchings from graphs to hypergraphs, as many important problems can be phrased in this framework, such as Ryser's conjecture on transversals in Latin squares and the Existence Conjecture for block designs. I will focus on Dirac-type conditions (minimum degree conditions) in uniform hypergraphs and discuss some recent progresses. In particular, we determine the minimum codegree threshold for the existence of a near perfect matching in hypergraphs, which confirms a conjecture of Rodl, Rucinski and Szemeredi, and we show that there is a polynomial-time algorithm that can determine whether a k-uniform hypergraph with minimum codegree n/k has a perfect matching, which solves a problem of Karpinski, Rucinski and Szymanska completely.

Differential equations for colored triangulations

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Olivier BernardiBrandeis University
We will present the solution to a statistical mechanics model on random lattices. More precisely, we consider the Potts model on the set of planar triangulations (embedded planar graph such that every face has degree 3). The partition function of this model is the generating function of vertex-colored triangulations counted according to the number of monochromatic edges and dichromatic edges. We characterize this partition function by a simple system of differential equations. Some special cases, such as properly 4-colored triangulations, lead to particularly simple equations waiting for a more direct combinatorial explanation. This is joint work with Mireille Bousquet-Melou.

Shallow Packings: Revisiting Haussler's Proof

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - 13:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Esther EzraNYU Polytechnic School of Engineering
In this talk I will present the notion of a \delta-packing for set systems of bounded primal shatter dimension (closely related to the notion of finite VC-dimension). The structure of \delta-packing, which has been studied by Dudley in 1978 and Haussler in 1995, emerges from empirical processes and is fundamental in theoretical computer science and in computational geometry in particular. Moreover, it has applications in geometric discrepancy, range searching, and epsilon-approximations, to name a few. I will discuss a variant of \delta-packings where all the sets have small cardinality, we call these structures "shallow packings", and then present an upper bound on their size under additional natural assumptions on the set system, which correspond to several geometric settings, among which is the case of points and halfspaces in d-dimensions.

Natural Selection, Game Theory and Genetic Diversity

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, October 7, 2014 - 13:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Georgios PiliourasCal Tech

Please Note: Bio: Georgios Piliouras is a postdoc at Caltech, Center for Mathematics and Computation. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University and has been a Georgia Tech postdoc at the EE department.

In a recent series of papers a strong connection has been established between standard models of sexual evolution in mathematical biology and Multiplicative Weights Updates Algorithm, a ubiquitous model of online learning and optimization. These papers show that mathematical models of biological evolution are tantamount to applying discrete replicator dynamics, a close variant of MWUA on coordination games. We show that in the case of coordination games, under minimal genericity assumptions, discrete replicator dynamics converge to pure Nash equilibria for all but a zero measure of initial conditions. This result holds despite the fact that mixed Nash equilibria can be exponentially (or even uncountably) many, completely dominating in number the set of pure Nash equilibria. Thus, in haploid organisms the long term preservation of genetic diversity needs to be safeguarded by other evolutionary mechanisms, such as mutation and speciation. This is joint work with Ruta Mehta and Ioannis Panageas.

Improved Approximation for Weighted Bipartite Edge Coloring

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, September 2, 2014 - 13:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Arindam KhanGeorgia Tech
Weighted Bipartite Edge Coloring problem is a generalization of two classical optimization problems: Bipartite Edge Coloring and Bin Packing. Given an edge-weighted bipartite multi-graph G, the goal is to color all edges with minimum colors such that the sum of the edges incident to any vertex of any color is at most one. Chung and Ross conjectured that given an instance of the weighted bipartite edge coloring problem, there is a proper weighted coloring using at most 2n-1 colors where n denotes the maximum over all the vertices of the number of unit-sized bins needed to pack the weights of edges incident at the vertex. In this talk I will present an algorithm that gives a proper weighted coloring using $20n/9$ colors and improved results for some special cases. I will also present an alternative proof of Konig's edge coloring theorem using skew-supermodular functions. The talk will have all three components of ACO: Approximation Algorithms, Graph Theory and Supermodular Optimization.

Integral versions of Helly's theorem

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - 13:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Jesús Antonio De LoeraUniversity of California at Davis
The famous Doignon-Bell-Scarf theorem is a Helly-type result about the existence of integer solutions on systems linear inequalities. The purpose of this paper is to present the following ``weighted'' generalization: Given an integer k, we prove that there exists a constant c(k,n), depending only on the dimension n and k, such that if a polyhedron {x : Ax <= b} contains exactly k integer solutions, then there exists a subset of the rows of cardinality no more than c(k,n), defining a polyhedron that contains exactly the same k integer solutions. We work on both upper and lower bounds for this constant. This is joint work with Quentin Louveaux, Iskander Aliev and Robert Bassett.

Sidon sets and extremal graph theory

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Thursday, April 24, 2014 - 12:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Craig TimmonsUC San Diego
Let G be an abelian group. A subset A of G is a Sidon set if A has the property that no sum of two elements of A is equal to another sum of two elements of A. These sets have a rich history in combinatorial number theory and frequently appear in the problem papers of Erdos. In this talk we will discuss some results in which Sidon sets were used to solve problems in extremal graph theory. This is joint work with Mike Tait and Jacques Verstraete.

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