Theory Lunch

Once a week, the Berkeley theory community gets together, socializes, has lunch, and then listens to an informal blackboard presentation on open questions, new results, old results worth not forgetting, or whatever is fit to entertain a crowd of theoreticians.

At the theory lunch, we do not believe in slides, rehearsed presentations, or stopping the speaker when he or she runs out of time.

Spring  2005 Schedule

Wednesdays, Noon, Wozniak Lounge, unless otherwise noted  (in 380 Soda on 3/9; in 380 Soda at 12:30 on  3/14; in 540 Cory on 5/11)

• April 20, Rohit Khandekar
• April 13, Scott Aaronson on computational complexity in the physical universe
• April 6, Sebastien Roch on learning phylogenies
• March 30, Salil Vadhan on pseudorandom walks and the L vs RL problem
• March 23 spring break
• March 14  [In 380 Soda, 12:30] TBA  (note: March 14 is a Monday)
• March 9 [In 380 Soda] Henry Lin on selfish routing and Braess's paradox
• March 2, Umesh Vazirani on the hidden subgroup problem in non-abelian groups 
• February 23, Luca Trevisan on applied additive number theory, see papers here, here, here, here and here
• February 16, [In 410 Hearst Mining] Peter Winkler on scheduling sequences of reals
• February 9  [In 410 Hearst Mining] René Beier on smoothed analysis of combinatorial optimization problems
• February 2, Shakhar Smorodinsky on geometric permutations and transversal theory
• January 26 [In 410 Hearst Mining] Vijay Vazirani on AdWords and Generalized Online Matching
• January  19, Adam Kalai on doing gradient descent without a gradient

Fall 2004 Schedule

• December 8, Tomás Feder
• December 1,  Robi Krauthgamer
• November 24, Elias Koutsoupias 
• November 17, Camil Demetrescu on shortest paths in dynamic graphs
• November 10,  [In 400 Cory]  Luca Trevisan on a new result in complexity theory
• November 3, Gene Myers on genome assembling and string graphs
• October 27,  [In 400 Cory]  Sanjeev Arora 
• October 20, FOCS, no lunch
• October 13, Yuval Peres on the Markov type of a metric space
• October 6, James Lee on Euclidean embeddings of negative-type metrics
• September 29, [In 400 Cory]  Alistair Sinclair on non-commutative circuits for  the determinant
• September 22, John Canny on privacy
• September 15, [In 400 Cory] Shakhar Smorodinsky on locally Delaunay graphs
• September 8, Hoeteck Wee on amplification of hardness for one-way functions
• September 1, Luca Trevisan on hierarchy theorems for probabilistic time (see papers here and here)

Schedule of past semesters

another theory lunch that meets three hours earlier.