Talks

These are some slide-talks I have given in the last few years.

Lately, I’ve mostly been using Keynote for my talks, and the files are provided below (with PDF/HTML exports). For older LaTeX / beamer talks, the source of most of these files may be found on my @bitbucket. You may have to remove some font declarations to be able to compile on your machine (I compile using xelatex). You are free to use any of the figures.

Popular science-y talks

• Yet another cool mathematical card trick
  • Research Science Initiative - Chennai (RSI-C) @ IIT Madras (2026-05-15)
  • Slides [.key] [.pdf]
  • Demos used in the talk: (5-card-version) (124-card-version)
• From card tricks to the Mandelbrot set
  • Research Science Initiative - Chennai @ IIT Madras (2026-05-15)
  • Vigyan Vidushi Mathematics (2025) @ TIFR (2025-07-07)
  • Slides: [.key] [.pdf]
• Colouring maps and keeping secrets
  • Chai and Why? (2023-03-05) at Prithvi Theatre
  • Sawaal Jawaab (2023-06-10) at B M Birla Science Centre (Hyderabad)
  • Video
  • Slides: [.key] [.html]
  • Interactive apps to colour maps and peel-and-colour.
• Commutators: A ridiculous (and fun!) way to solve Rubik’s cubes and (not) solve equations
  • STEMS 2021 camp (part of Tesselate, CMI) (2021-01-08)
  • Video
  • (Similar to the talk below)
  • Slides [.key] (~14MB)
  • Rubik’s cube demos that were used in the talk (built from http://alg.cubing.net) and this awesome visualisation of roots of polynomials over complex numbers by Leo Stein
• Commutators: A ridiculous (and fun!) way to hang pictures and solve Rubik’s cubes
  • [Video] from the online Chai and Why?. (2020-12-20)
  • Slides: [.key] (~13MB)
  • Demos that were used in the talk (built from http://alg.cubing.net)

Technical talks

• Factors of succinctly computable polynomials
  • IIT Hyderabad (September 2025)
  • Slides: [.html] [.key]
• Derandomization from Algebraic Hardness
  • IIT Bombay (July 2019)
  • Source files may be found here
• Near-optimal Bootstrapping of Hitting Sets
  • Workshop on Algebraic Methods at the Simons Institute 2018 [slides] [video]
  • Dagstuhl Seminar on Algebraic Methods in Computational Complexity 2018 [slides]
  • Source files may be found here
• Exponential lower bounds for hom. depth-5 circuits over finite fields
  • CCC 2017, Riga, Latvia
  • Source files may be found here.
• Finer separations between shallow arithmetic circuits
  • FSTTCS 2016, Chennai, India
  • Source files may be found here.
• Efficiently decoding Reed-Muller codes from random errors
  • IIT Kanpur
  • Source files may be found here.
• Functional lower bounds for arithmetic circuits
  • Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2016), Tokyo, Japan
  • Source files may be found here.
• Lower bounds for shallow circuits
  • Job talk, survey-ish with some high level view of the depth-5 lower bound.
  • Source files may be found here.
• Depth Reduction in arithmetic circuits
  • Workshop on Arithmetic Complexity Theory (WACT 2015), Saarbrucken, Germany
  • Source files may be found here.
• Arithmetic Circuits: A chasm at depth three
  • TCS+ Online Seminar
  • Source files may be found here.
• Approaching the chasm at depth four
  • CCC 2013, Palo Alto, California, USA.
  • Source files may be found here.
• Jacobians hits all circuits
  • Microsoft Research India, Bangalore. 2012
  • Source files may be found here.

My earlier talks can also be found @bitbucket.