Pseudorandomness in Mathematics and Computer Science Mini-Workshop

Pseudorandomness in Mathematics and Computer Science Mini-Workshop

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

School of Mathematics

Institute for Advanced Study

In math, one often studies random aspects of deterministic systems and structures. In CS, one often tries to efficiently create structures and systems with specific random-like properties. Recent work has shown many connections between these two approaches through the concept of "pseudorandomness".

Lectures by Bourgain, Impagliazzo, Sarnak and Wigderson, which were aimed at nonspecialists, explored some of the facets of pseudorandomness, with particular emphasis on research directions and open problems that connect the different viewpoints of this concept in math and CS.

1:30 - 2:15 Jean Bourgain: Exponential sums, equidistribution and pseudorandomness

Supplemental information: Additive Combinatorics Sum-Product Phenomena

2:15 - 3:00 Russell Impagliazzo: When do sparse sets have dense models?

Lecture notes taken by Arkadev Chattopadhyay

3:00 - 3:30 Coffee/Tea + cookies break

3:30 - 4:15 Peter Sarnak: Substitution sequences at primes

4:15 - 5:00 Avi Wigderson: Randomness extractors

Lecture notes taken by Zeev Dvir

Videos of all lectures are available at https://www.ias.edu/video/pseudo.