# tcs math – some mathematics of theoretical computer science

## January 7, 2011

### Reading for a rainy day

Filed under: Math, Reading — James Lee @ 4:16 am

Today it’s raining in both Seattle and Paris. Here are a few things I think are worth reading while the weather clears up.

• Stop collecting coupons. Recently, Batson, Spielman, and Srivastava gave a beautiful sparsification result for graphs: Every graph has a linear-sized spectral sparsifier. Here is one statement of their result (taken from Srivastava’s thesis):

Theorem [BSS]: For every $\varepsilon > 0$ and $m,n \in \mathbb N$, the following holds. For every $x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_m \in \mathbb R^n$, there are non-negative numbers $s_1, s_2, \ldots, s_m$ of which at most $O(n/\varepsilon^2)$ are non-zero, and such that for all $y \in \mathbb R^n$,

$\displaystyle (1-\varepsilon)^2 \sum_{i=1}^m \langle x_i, y \rangle^2 \leq \sum_{i=1}^m s_i \langle x_i,y\rangle^2 \leq (1+\varepsilon)^2 \sum_{i=1}^m \langle x_i, y\rangle^2.$

Assaf Naor has given a very nice account of some recent geometric applications of this idea. These involves breaking the $n \log n$ “coupon collecting” barrier from a number of results which were previously based on random sampling. There is still an outstanding open problem left open here: Embedding $n$-dimensional subspaces of $L_1$ into $\ell_1^{O(n)}$.

• Lecture notes that are lecture notes. Some people write lecture notes like they are preliminary book drafts. These lecture notes by Ryan O’Donnell for an undergraduate course on “Probability and Computing” are like transcribed lectures. They’re conversational, with philosophical asides–a great example of the style.

• Metaphors in systolic geometry. Larry Guth and Nets Katz recently made awesome progress on the Erdos distance problem in the plane. On a different note, here is a great informal survey of Guth on Gromov’s systolic inequality (which itself answers the question—when would an isometric embedding into $L_{\infty}$ ever be employed for the usefulness of the ambient space?!)

• An important epsilon. Finally, there is the recent result of Gharan, Saberi, and Singh giving a $3/2 - \varepsilon$ approximation for the Traveling Salesman Problem in unweighted graphs. I haven’t gotten a chance to digest the paper yet. Here’s hoping someone else will write an overview of the key ideas.

## January 4, 2011

### Metric 2011: Metric geometry, groups, and algorithms

Filed under: Announcement, Math — Tags: , , , — James Lee @ 3:29 pm

There will be a program at the Institut Henri Poincaré from Jan 5 to Mar 31 on “Metric geometry, algorithms, and groups.” Visit the web site, or that of the sister program on Discrete Analysis at the Newton Institute.

Notes from the program and related courses and talks will be posted at the Metric 2011 blog.