TCS+ talk: Wednesday, March 5, Prasanna Ramakrishnan, Stanford University
Clement Canonne
To kick off the new season of TCS+, our first talk of the semester will take place this coming Wednesday, March 5th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time (10:00 AM Pacific Time, 19:00 Central European Time, 18:00 UTC). Prasanna Ramakrishnan from Stanford University will tell us "How to Appease a Voter Majority" (abstract below).
(As a peek ahead, on March 19, Tom Gur (University of Cambridge) will speak about "A Zero-Knowledge PCP Theorem". Stay tuned!)
Please sign up on the online form at https://sites.google.com/view/tcsplus/welcome/next-tcs-talk if you wish to join the talk as an individual or a group. Registration is /not/ required to attend the interactive talk, and the link will be posted on the website the day prior to the talk; however, by registering in the form, you will receive a reminder, along with the link. (The link to the recording will also be posted on our website afterwards.)
Hoping to see you all there,
The organizers
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Speaker: Prasanna Ramakrishnan (Stanford University)
Title: How to Appease a Voter Majority
Abstract: In 1785, Condorcet established a frustrating property of elections and majority rule: it is possible that, no matter which candidate you pick as the winner, a majority of voters will prefer someone else. You might have the brilliant idea of picking a small set of winners instead of just one, but how do you avoid the nightmare scenario where a majority of the voters prefer some other candidate over all the ones you picked? How many candidates suffice to appease a majority of the voters? In this talk, we will explore this question. Along the way, we will roll some dice — both because the analysis involves randomness and because of a connection to the curious phenomenon of intransitive dice, that has delighted recreational and professional mathematicians alike ever since Martin Gardner popularized it in 1970.
Based on joint work with Moses Charikar, Alexandra Lassota, Adrian Vetta, and Kangning Wang.