Dartmouth Events

Please join us in Kemeny 008 on Monday, April 17, 2023, at 6:00 p.m., for a public lecture given by Alex Lubotzky, Einstein Institute of Mathematics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Weizmann Institute of Science. Title and abstract are below. 

Title: New directions in error correcting codes

Abstract: Error Correcting Codes (ECC) are used to detect and correct errors when data is transmitted from the sender to the receiver over a noisy channel. Shannon and Hamming laid the foundations of the mathematical theory of ECC over 75 years ago. Ever since then, it has been an intensive area of study in various branches of science. In the talk we will present some of the sources and highlights of this theory, putting an emphasis on the 1990s breakthrough of Sipser and Spielman, who created low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, as well as the recent solution to the long-standing problem of the existence of locally testable codes (LTC). These codes, whose existence was doubted for many years, enable the receiver to check if the message is mostly correct by reading only a few bits of it, a property that seems very counterintuitive!