Department Colloquium

Date & Time: Monday, 24th October, 2011 at 5 p.m.

Venue: Ramanujan Hall

Title: Explicit Block Diagonalization

Speaker: Prof. M.K.Srinivasan, IIT Bombay

Abstract:Explicit block diagonalization (EBD) is the noncommutative analog of diagonalization (explicitly finding the eigenvalues of a real symmetric matrix).

The use of EBD in combinatorics was recently pioneered by Lex Schrijver, during the course of deriving his celebrated Schrijver bound, a semidefinite programming bound on binary code size that improves the Delsarte bound (based on linear programming ). Since then EBD has been used to solve several interesting problems.

In this talk we will give an introduction to this technique.