Mathematics Colloquium - Alexander Barvinok
March 24, 2026 11:00AM—12:00PM
Location:
In Person
-
Wean Hall 8220
Speaker:
ALEXANDER BARVINOK,
Professor of Mathematics, University of Michigan
https://lsa.umich.edu/math/people/faculty/barvinok.html
Given a finite family of events in some probability space, we want to compute (or approximate) the probability of the intersection of their complements. In the standard interpretation, each event signifies something unfortunate happening, and we are interested in the probability that none of the unfortunate events actually happen. If the events are independent, the probability in question is determined of course by the probabilities of the events themselves. I am planning to discuss what happens when the events are not independent, but the dependencies are controlled, for example, by controlling the maximum degree of the dependency graph of the family. It turns out then that the probability in question can be approximated from the probabilities of intersections of subfamilies of logarithmic size. Some quite natural questions remain open, however.
For More Information:
rkrueger@andrew.cmu.edu