Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We study the asymptotic behaviors of the pairwise angles among n randomly and uniformly distributed unit vectors in p-dimensional spaces as the number of points n goes to infinity, while the dimension p is either fixed or growing with n. For both settings, we derive the limiting empirical distribution of the random angles and the limiting distributions of the extreme angles. The results reveal interesting differences in the two settings and provide a precise characterization of the folklore that ``all high-dimensional random vectors are almost always nearly orthogonal to each other". Applications to statistics and connections with some open problems in physics and mathematics are also discussed. This is a joint work with Tony Cai and Jianqing Fan.

The mapping class group of a surface is a quotient of the group of orientation preserving diffeomorphisms. However the mapping class group generally can't be lifted to the group of diffeomorphisms, and even many subgroups can't be lifted. Given a surface S of genus at least 2 and a marked point z, the fundamental group of S naturally injects to a subgroup of MCG(S,z). I will present a result of Bestvina-Church-Souto that this subgroup can't be lifted to the diffeomorphisms fixing z.

Answering a question of R. Stanley, we show that for each t ≥1, there is a least positive integer f(t) so that a planar poset with t minimal elements has dimension at most f(t). In particular, we show that f(t) ≤ 2t + 1 and that this inequality is tight for t=1 and t=2. For larger values of t, we can only show that f(t) ≥ t+3. This research is joint work with Georgia Tech graduate student Ruidong Wang.

Discrepancy theory, also referred to as the theory of irregularities of distribution, has been developed into a diverse and fascinating field, with numerous closely related areas, including, numerical integration, Ramsey theory, graph theory, geometry, and theoretical computer science, to name a few. Informally, given a set system S defined over an n-item set X, the combinatorial discrepancy is the minimum, over all two-colorings of X, of the largest deviation from an even split, over all sets in S. Since the celebrated ``six standard deviations suffice'' paper of Spencer in 1985, several long standing open problems in the theory of combinatorial discrepancy have been resolved, including tight discrepancy bounds for halfspaces in d-dimensions [Matousek 1995] and arithmetic progressions [Matousek and Spencer 1996]. In this talk, I will present new discrepancy bounds for set systems of bounded ``primal shatter dimension'', with the property that these bounds are sensitive to the actual set sizes. These bounds are nearly-optimal. Such set systems are abstract, but they can be realized by simply-shaped regions, as halfspaces, balls, and octants in d-dimensions, to name a few. Our analysis exploits the so-called "entropy method" and the technique of "partial coloring", combined with the existence of small "packings".