October 2019: We are delighted to announce that János Pach has been awarded the Bézout chair! He will visit the Bézout Labex, hosted by Frédéric Meunier (CERMICS) and Nabil Mustafa (LIGM), between October 15, 2019 and November 15, 2019, and also for two months in 2020.
His Bézout lecture will take place on November 12 at 2pm in the seminar room of CERMICS (Cité Descartes, Coriolis building, left aisle, 2nd floor). See below for a title and abstract.
Professor Pach is currently affiliated with the Renyi Institute Budapest and MIPT Moscow. He has received many distinctions in his research carrier, including membership at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is a mathematician and computer scientist working in the fields of combinatorics and discrete and computational geometry.
Title: How to escape the curse of dimensionality in combinatorics
Abstract: According to Gelfand, “at the bottom of most deep mathematical questions there is a combinatorial problem.” Combinatorics, once viewed as “the slums of topology,” has come a long way during the past century. It has its own powerful techniques and close ties to algebra, topology, information theory, and several other disciplines. Nevertheless, many basic combinatorial problems, including ones needed for applications, are wide open, partially due to a phenomenon called “combinatorial explosion” or the “curse of dimension.” In this talk, we will illustrate how to solve some notoriously difficult open problems by restricting our attention to certain combinatorial structures arising in geometric, algebraic, and practical applications. The talk will be entirely self-contained, and no previous knowledge of the subject will be assumed.