Please join the Illinois Tech Department of Applied Mathematics on Monday, October 31, at 1:50 p.m. in IT 6D6-1 for a Colloquium by Professor Anton Bernshteyn of Georgia Institute of Technology on “Distributed Computing and Descriptive Combinatorics.”

Speaker: Anton Bernshteyn, Georgia Institute of Technology

Title: Distributed Computing and Descriptive Combinatorics

Abstract: The topic of this talk is a recently discovered connection between two seemingly very disparate fields: distributed computing and descriptive combinatorics. Distributed computing is the area of computer science concerned with problems that can be solved efficiently by a (finite) decentralized network of processors. Descriptive combinatorics, on the other hand, studies combinatorial problems on infinite graphs under additional topological or measure-theoretic regularity constraints and is largely motivated by questions in set theory, ergodic theory, and topological dynamics. It turns out that these two areas are intimately related to each other, and there are formal ways of translating results from one context to the other one. I will survey what is known about this connection and outline some open problems.

Speaker Bio:
Anton Bernshteyn is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an organizer of the Atlanta Combinatorics Colloquium, a seminar in discrete mathematics jointly hosted by the combinatorics groups at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, and Emory University. Professor Bernshteyn’s main areas of research are combinatorics and descriptive set theory, including graph coloring, probabilistic methods, extremal combinatorics, and Borel/measurable combinatorics with applications to ergodic theory.