Friday, September 12, 2008
3:30 pm, MC 5158

Tutte Seminar Series
Combinatorics & Optimization
Fall 2008


Noga Alon
Tel Aviv University and IAS, Princeton

Combinatorial reasoning in Information Theory

Combinatorial arguments have played a crucial role in the investigation of several surprising phenomena in Information Theory. After a a brief discussion of some of these results I will describe a recent example, based on joint work with Lubetzky and Stav, and with Weinstein, in which properties of graph powers, colorings of Cayley graphs, and the chromatic numbers of Kneser graphs are applied in the study of a broadcasting problem with side information.