Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Gaps in my knowledge

If I was starting over with my education... here are some courses I wish I had had when I was a student:

- Probability and random walks, "a la" Yuval Peres
- Spectral graph theory.

3 comments:

  1. If you don't mind filling the gaps in our knowledge with the gaps in yours, what are your favorite applications of spectral methods to graph algorithms ?
    I know there are applications to the search of large cliques (and more generally dense subgraphs), but surely there must be lots of other applications...

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  2. You can teach those classes now. Then you'll learn even more than if you had taken those classes when you were a student

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  3. Pascal: the Arora-Barak-Steurer slightly subexponential algorithm for unique games is my worry of the day.

    Luca: true. I taught a lecture on half of the Arora-Barak-Steurer paper yesterday, and got to show how confused I was about more or less everything. My nose is barely above the water, and when a factor of n suddenly appears or disappears, or an x becomes 1-x, or there is an extraneous factor of 1/2, I cannot tell whether there is a typo or whether I am overlooking something. Fortunately I get a second chance next week... (and I printed notes from your blog today, just in case they happen to be enlightening!)

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