Courant Lectures 2017, Part II
Friday, April 7, 2017, 11:00am
Warren Weaver Hall, Room 102
Professor Avi Wigderson
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Symbolic matrices
Our object of study will be matrices whose entries are linear forms in a given set of variables. We will be interested in their rank, both when variables commute and when they do not. Understanding this seemingly simple "linear algebraic" structure is important in several areas in mathematics and computational complexity. I will review some of these connections, and structural and computational problems and results regarding the rank symbolic matrices.
While this topic is very related to the first lecture (indeed, it partly motivated that work), I will not assume that you attended it.
Information on past Courant Lectures is available here.