Constructive and Non-constructive Aspects of the Lovasz Local Lemma

Speaker: 

Aravind Srinivasan

Affiliation: 

University of Maryland at College Park
Department of Computer Science
Room 3263, A.V. Williams Building
College Park, MD 20742
United States of America

Time: 

Monday, 1 July 2013, 14:30 to 17:00

Venue: 

  • A-269 (DAA Seminar)

Organisers: 

In three talks, I will describe aspects of the Local Lemma that have recently been uncovered by Moser & Tardos, Pegden, and David Harris and myself. As a running example, we will consider the following type of "graph transversal" problem introduced by Bollobas, Erdos and Szemeredi in the 1970s: given a graph $G = (V,E)$ and an integer $s$, for how small a $b$ can we guarantee that no matter how $V$ has been partitioned into blocks, each of size at least $b$, there is a way of choosing one vertex from each block such that the chosen vertices do not induce a clique on $s$ vertices?