"The Power and Weakness of Randomness (When You Are Short on Time)"

Avi Wigderson
Professor, School of Mathematics
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey

Thursday, October 9, 2003 at 4 p.m.
Askwith Hall in Longfellow Hall, Radcliffe Yard
Free and open to the public
For more information, call (617) 495-8922.

Avi Wigderson will discuss randomness, the meaning and utility of which man has grappled with for centuries, as well as recent research into the theory of computation, which has enriched our understanding of randomness considerably. He will show how the use of random coin flips can dramatically speed up computation for a variety of problems and settings. He will also explain the new computationally motivated definition of randomness and show how it may be generated deterministically, from computationally difficult problems.

Wigderson is on leave from a professorship at the Computer Science Institute at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He won the Yoram Ben-Porat Presidential Prize for Outstanding Researcher, the Nevanlinna Prize, a Bergman Fellowship, and an Alon Fellowship. He sits on the editorial board of Computational Complexity. He received his BSc in computer science from the Israel Institute of Technology and his PhD in computer science from Princeton University.

The 2003–2004 Lectures on Randomness and Computation are sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.