Student Representation Theory Seminar

The P vs NP problem is one of the seven millennium prize problems. Leslie Valiant formulated a purely algebraic version of this problem, widely known as VP vs VNP, which can be attacked by algebraic methods. Mulmuley and Sohoni's ambitious approach to this problem is to reduce it to a special case of the following problem -- for a representation V of a group G, does the orbit closure of a point v contain another point w? This approach is called geometric complexity theory (GCT) and has captured the imagination of computer scientists, representation theorists and algebraic geometers alike. In this talk, we will give a very accessible overview of this GCT program. Speaker(s): Visu Makam (University of Michigan)