Current Topics Seminar
| Speaker | Christopher Hoffman |
| Title | Existence of things we cannot see |
| Date | January 15 4:00pm PDL C-36 |
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The probabilistic method allows us to show the existence of objects
where constructive method have not been successful. We do this by
putting a measure on a set. Then we use probabilistic techniques to
show that the subset of objects that has a desired property has
positive measure. Thus this subset is nonempty. We will give a few
examples of this. Then we will put a family of measures on the set of
two dimensional simplicial complexes with n vertices. We are
interested in the fundamental group of a "typical" simplicial complex.
We will explain how this may be related to a conjecture in geometric
group theory.
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