[Colloquium] REMINDER: Talk by Zeev Dvir Today

[Katie Casey]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Date: Monday, April 27, 2009
Time: 3:45 p.m.
Place: RY 251

----------------------------------------------------------

Speaker:	Zeev Dvir

From:		IAS

Website: 	http://www.math.ias.edu/%7edvir/

Title:       Recent Progress on Kakeya Sets, Mergers and Extractors

Abstract:       Kakeya sets (in vector spaces over finite fields) are  
sets that contain a line in every direction. It was conjectured by  
Wolff in 1999 that every Kakeya set has positive density (its size is  
a constant fraction of the whole space). This conjecture is motivated  
by several problems in mathematics and in computer science. In  
particular, it has a tight connection with explicit constructions of  
‘extractors’ and ‘mergers’ which are efficient procedures that  
transform weak sources of randomness into stron ones and have many  
applications. In this talk I will show the recent proof of Wolff’s  
conjecture [D. 08], the application of the proof technique to the  
construction of mergers and extractors [D. Wigderson 08] and a new  
work [D. Kopparty Sudan Saraf 09] that extends the methods in earlier  
papers to derived near optimal bounds on Kakeya sets and mergers.


Refreshments will be served prior to the talk in RY 255.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/colloquium/attachments/20090427/d2d642f8/attachment.htm