Type of Talk: UTCS Colloquium/ACT Seminar

Speaker/Af

filiation: Avi Wigderson/Institute for Advanced Study

Date/Time:
Thursday, April 22, 2010, 4:00 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.402

Host: David Zuckerman

Talk Title: Expanders, Groups and
Representations

Talk Abstract:

I will survey some wo

rk on (mainly iterative) constructions of expanding
Cayley graphs (and
other expanding structures). I will also present some
interesting ope

n questions on different relationships between expansion and
the irred

ucible representations in finite groups, motivated by this and
other

work.

Speaker Bio:

Avi Wigderson is a Professor with

the Institute of Advanced Study, School
of Mathematics. His main rese

arch interests are randomness and computation,
algorithms and optimiz

ation, complexity theory, circuit complexity, proof
complexity, qu

antum computation and communication, and cyptography and
distributed

computation. He received the Nevanlinna prize in 1994, and the
G?del

Prize in 2009 for outstanding paper in theoretical computer science.
P

rofessor Wigderson received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.