Fall 2008

18.315 (Combinatorial Theory: Probabilistic Methods)

Instructor: Jeff Kahn, 2-377, jkahn@math.mit.edu
Time and place: MWF 11-12, 2-135
Office hours: MWF 2-4
Grader: Junkyu An
Grader's office hours: Th 2-4, 2-486

Grades: No exams; grades will be based on problem sets (there will be five or six of them).

A little background

Problem sets: TeX strongly preferred, may become mandatory if your handwriting is hard to read.

[NO LATE HOMEWORK, PLEASE]

Problem Set 1 (due 17 September, 4:00 PM) and Solutions

Problem Set 2 (due 3 October, 4:00 PM) and Solutions

Problem Set 3 (due 20 October, 4:00 PM) and Solutions

Problem Set 4 (due 5 November, 4:00 PM) and Solutions

Problem Set 5 (due 21 November, 4:00 PM) and Solutions

Problem Set 6 (due 10 December, 4:00 PM) and Solutions

Bulletin board:

Shirley Entzminger (2-345) will hold graded problem sets until the end of January.

Seminar

Time and place: Thursdays, 4:00 PM; room 2-136

9 September: Suho Oh, Fractional coloring and Hadwiger's Conjecture

16 September: Craig Desjardins, Sarkaria's proof of Tverberg's theorem

23 September: Jose Soto, Ryser's conjecture for Tripartite 3-graphs

30 September: Jose Soto, Hall's Theorem for hypergraphs

7 October: Amanda Redlich, An average set size theorem

14 October: Alejandro Morales, Random (symmetric) Bernoulli matrices are almost surely nonsingular

23 October: Alejandro Morales, Random (symmetric) Bernoulli matrices are almost surely nonsingular II

30 October: Lionel Levine, Chip-firing and a devil's staircase

6 November: Alex Samorodnitsky, A modified log-Sobolev inequality on the Hamming cube and some applications

13 November: Alexei Spiridonov, The zero-trees theorem for hypergraphs

20 November: Alexei Spiridonov, The zero-trees theorem for hypergraphs II

4 December: Ankur Moitra, Every decision tree has an influential variable

Some possibilities