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SUMMARY:IC Colloquium : Randomness and pseudorandomness
DTSTART:20130920T151500
DTEND:20130920T163000
DTSTAMP:20260407T105918Z
UID:310c858e14660dad1e97192e02ce8a7322cb679d5afae05c317827f8
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Avi Widgerson - Institute for Advanced Study\, Princeton\nAbst
 ract\nIs the universe inherently deterministic or probabilistic? Perhaps m
 ore importantly - can we tell the difference between the two?\nHumanity ha
 s pondered the meaning and utility of randomness for millennia. There is a
  remarkable variety of ways in which we utilize perfect coin tosses to our
  advantage: in statistics\, cryptography\, game theory\, algorithms\, gamb
 ling... Indeed\, randomness seems indispensable! Which of these applicatio
 ns survive if the universe had no randomness in it at all? Which of them s
 urvive if only poor quality randomness is available\, e.g. that arises fro
 m "unpredictable" phenomena like the weather or the stock market?\nPseudor
 andomness - a  computational theory of randomness\, developed in the past
  three decades\, studies deterministic structures with random-like behavio
 r\, and turns out to underlie fundamental problems in a variety of mathema
 tics\, computer science and engineering areas. This theory also reveals (p
 erhaps counter-intuitively) that almost all applications designed to work 
 under perfect randomness actually survive in  weakly random or even compl
 etely deterministic worlds.  In the talk I'll explain the main ideas and 
 results of this theory.Biography\nAvi Wigderson did his undergraduate stud
 ies at the Technion in Haifa\, Israel. He graduated in 1980\, and went on 
 to graduate study at Princeton University. In 1983 he received his PhD for
  work in computational complexity. After this\, he held positions at U.C B
 erkeley\, IBM Research in San Jose\, MSRI in Berkeley\, at Princeton Unive
 rsity\, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem\, and Tel Aviv University. Sinc
 e 1999 he has a position at the Institute for Advanced Study\, which is cu
 rrently his full time residence. Avi Wigderson works in the areas of Rando
 mness and Computation\, Complexity Theory\, Combinatorics and Graph Theory
 \, and many others. He received the Nevanlinna Prize in 1994 for his work 
 on computational complexity. In 2009\, he won the Gödel Prize. He was an 
 invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1990 an
 d 1994\, and gave a plenary talk at the International Congress of Mathemat
 icians in 2006.
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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