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Category Archives: Probability
Boolean Functions: Influence, Threshold, and Noise
Here is the written version of my address at the 7ECM last July in Berlin. Boolean functions, Influence, threshold, and Noise Trying to follow an example of a 1925 lecture by Landau (mentioned in the lecture), the writing style is very … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Probability
Tagged Boolean functions
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The US Elections and Nate Silver: Informtion Aggregation, Noise Sensitivity, HEX, and Quantum Elections.
Being again near general elections is an opportunity to look at some topics we talked about over the years. I am quite fond of (and a bit addicted to) Nate Silver’s site FiveThirtyEight. Silver’s models tell us what is the probability that … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Probability, Quantum
Tagged Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Nate Silver
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TYI 26: Attaining the Maximum
(Thanks, Dani!) Given a random sequence , ******, , let . and assume that . What is the probability that the maximum value of is attained only for a single value of ? Test your intuition: is this probability bounded … Continue reading
More Reasons for Small Influence
Readers of the big-league ToC blogs have already heard about the breakthrough paper An average-case depth hierarchy theorem for Boolean circuits by Benjamin Rossman, Rocco Servedio, and Li-Yang Tan. Here are blog reports on Computational complexity, on the Shtetl Optimized, and of Godel … Continue reading
Two Delightful Major Simplifications
Arguably mathematics is getting harder, although some people claim that also in the old times parts of it were hard and known only to a few experts before major simplifications had changed matters. Let me report here about two recent remarkable simplifications … Continue reading
Influence, Threshold, and Noise
My dear friend Itai Benjamini told me that he won’t be able to make it to my Tuesday talk on influence, threshold, and noise, and asked if I already have the slides. So it occurred to me that perhaps … Continue reading
Analysis of Boolean Functions week 5 and 6
Lecture 7 First passage percolation 1) Models of percolation. We talked about percolation introduced by Broadbent and Hammersley in 1957. The basic model is a model of random subgraphs of a grid in n-dimensional space. (Other graphs were considered later as … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Probability, Teaching
Tagged Arrow's theorem, Percolation
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Analysis of Boolean Functions – Week 3
Lecture 4 In the third week we moved directly to the course’s “punchline” – the use of Fourier-Walsh expansion of Boolean functions and the use of Hypercontractivity. Before that we started with a very nice discrete isoperimetric question on a … Continue reading
Analysis of Boolean functions – week 2
Post on week 1; home page of the course analysis of Boolean functions Lecture II: We discussed two important examples that were introduced by Ben-Or and Linial: Recursive majority and tribes. Recursive majority (RM): is a Boolean function with variables … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Probability, Teaching
Tagged Boolean functions, Tribes
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Poznań: Random Structures and Algorithms 2013
Michal Karonski (left) who built Poland’s probabilistic combinatorics group at Poznań, and a sculpture honoring the Polish mathematicians who first broke the Enigma machine (right, with David Conlon, picture taken by Jacob Fox). Update: Here is a picture from 2015, while … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Conferences, Open problems, Philosophy, Probability
Tagged Poznan, RSA
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