Speaker(s): Professor Avi Wigderson (Institute for Advanced Study Princeton)

Date: Monday 28 March 2011 17:00 to 18:00
Venue: Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences
Title: Rothschild Lecture: The power and weakness of randomness, when you are short on time
Programme: Discrete Analysis

Man has grappled with the meaning and utility of randomness for centuries. Research in the Theory of Computation in the last thirty years has enriched this study considerably. I'll describe two main aspects of this research on randomness, demonstrating respectively its power and weakness for making algorithms efficient. Time permitting, I will address the role of randomness in other computational settings, such as space bounded computation and probabilistic and zeroknowledge proofs.