Title : Matrix Permanent and Its Norm
Speaker: Pat Devlin, Rutgers University
Date: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 12:10pm
Location: Graduate Student Lounge, 7th Floor, Hill Center, Rutgers University, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ
Abstract:
The permanent of a matrix is super important. It's a lot like the determinant except that the permanent is notoriously difficult to work with. So it's nice when you can say anything at all about the permanent. In this talk, we (essentially) characterize the matrices whose permanents are large, and we show the outline of the proof. The main idea is to exploit a known formula relating the permanent to the expectation of a certain random variable, and then we just beat the thing to death via the magic of probability. This is joint work with Ross Berkowitz, and time permitting I may get around to mentioning this fact.