CS G399: Gems of Theoretical Computer Science; Spring 2009

Instructor: Emanuele Viola

Meetings: Tuesday 10:30 - 12:10 in Room 166 WVH map and Friday 1:35 PM - 3:15 PM Room 429 Ryder Hall (RY), 11 Leon St., campus map, map.

Office Hours: by appointment.

Course Description

This course covers some of the most exciting and recent progress in theoretical computer science. It presents state-of-the-art results on active research areas, and teaches related proof techniques. A tentative list of topics includes: Lower bounds for constant-depth circuits.

The Nisan-Wigderson pseudorandom generator.

Cryptography in constant parallel time.

The complexity of Nash equilibria.

Undirected connectivity in logarithmic space (SL = L).

Communication complexity.

Primes is in P.

Fast matrix multiplication.





No background is required for this class. However, this is a theoretical course with emphasis on theorems and proofs, so ``mathematical maturity'' is expected.



Each student is required to scribe (#lectures/#students) lectures.



Class schedule

Problems (*)