Seminar:
Fall 2015, Thursdays, Blocker 506A, 4:00-4:50 PM
Date: November 19
Florent P. Baudier
Abstract
Our ability to embed faithfully a certain type of metric space into a space with some desirable geometric properties can have a tremendous impact in the resolution and understanding of fundamental problems that arise in theoretical computer science (e.g. the design of efficient approximation algorithms), in noncommutative geometry (e.g. the Baum-Connes conjecture), or in topology (e.g. the Novikov conjecture). A significant portion of the lecture will be devoted to a gentle introduction to two embedding problems (distortion of finite metric spaces/coarse embeddability of groups) and their applications (multi-commodity flows/Novikov conjecture).