Think randomly: the power of the probabilistic method
The speaker for the Spring 2024 Howard Rowlee Lecture is Alan Frieze of Carnegie Mellon University.
The lecture will be held at 4 p.m., Friday, March 22, in room 115 of Avery Hall. A reception will precede the lecture in room 348 of Avery Hall at 3 p.m. All faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend.
Abstract
This lecture will give some simple examples of the use of the probabilistic method. It uses tools from probability to prove the existence of combinatorial objects that can be hard to find deterministically. This idea was pioneered by the great Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős and it is now part of the standard toolkit for combinatorialists. We will consider four problems where we can obtain results very easily via random methods. On the other hand, in these instances, non-random constrictions seem much harder to obtain.