Computer Science Colloquium, 2008-2009

In this talk I survey several basic problems in Combinatorics which take on a new life when we take a high-dimensional perspective of well-known objects. In particular we move from graphs to simplicial complexes and from matrices to higher-dimensional tensors. In particular we speak about a combinatorial perspective of simplicial topology, including an extremal view and a probabilistic one. We also ask for higher-dimensional analogues of numerous basic combinatorial objects such as permutations.

(Note: Prof. Linial will give a second lecture on Thurs Nov. 20 at 12:15 in the CS Theory Seminar, Jacobs Building, room 205, University of Haifa, "Eigenfunctions of graphs and why we care")