June 14 - 18, 2010

Organizers:  Jean Bourgain, Russell Impagliazzo, Peter Sarnak and Avi Wigderson

Workshop Homepage:http://www.math.ias.edu/pseudo2010

Program: http://www.math.ias.edu/pseudo2010/program.

*It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest. Each participant in a competitive economy is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.*
Adam Smith, 1776

The cover time of a graph is one of the most basic and well-studied properties of the simple random walk, and yet a number of fundamental questions concerning cover times have remained open. We show that there is a deep connection between cover times of graphs and Talagrand's majorizing measure theory. In particular, we prove that the cover time can be characterized, up to universal constants, by the majorizing measure value of a certain metric space on the underlying graph.

Intensive study throughout the last three decades has yielded a rigorous understanding of the spectral-gap of the Glauber dynamics for the Ising model on Z² everywhere except at criticality. While the critical behavior of the Ising model has long been the focus for physicists, mathematicians have only recently developed an understanding of its critical geometry with the advent of SLE, CLE and new tools to study conformally invariant systems. A rich interplay exists between the static and dynamic models.

We consider the problem of approximately solving a system of homogeneous linear equations over reals, where each equation contains at most three variables. Since the all-zero assignment always satisfies all the equations exactly, we restrict the assignments to be "non-trivial".

The ordinary homology of a subset S of Euclidean space depends only on its topology. By systematically organizing homology of neighborhoods of S, we get quantities that measure the shape of S, rather than just its topology. These quantities can be used to define a new notion of fractional dimension of S. They can also be effectively calculated on a computer.