Student Seminar
Speaker: Omkar Ramdas, IIT Bombay
Host: Suman Kumar Sahoo
Title: Putting on Your Thinking Cap: How to Get A Head in a Guessing Game
Time, day and date: 3:30:00 PM – 4:30:00 PM, Friday, September 11
Venue: Ramanujan Hall
Abstract: You might have heard about the Colored hats guessing game where 'n' players, each wearing a randomly assigned black or white hat, must attempt to guess their own hat color without communicating. A simple strategy easily yields a 50% success rate, so the real question is "Can we improve this success rate significantly?". We will demonstrate how to improve these odds for a large, fixed 'n' by translating the game into a structural problem on the Boolean hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$. We will then use some basic probabilistic methods to get better strategy which will "almost" surely make you win. If time permits, we will see its connections with Hamming codes.

Plancherel measure
Speaker: Dipendra Prasad, IIT Bombay
Title: Plancherel measure
Time, day and date: 5:00:00 PM – 6:15:00 PM, Friday, September 11
Venue: Room 215
Abstract: Waldspurger, J.-L. La formule de Plancherel pour les groupes p-adiques (d'après Harish-Chandra). (French) [The Plancherel formula for p-adic groups (after Harish-Chandra)] J. Inst. Math. Jussieu 2 (2003), no. 2, 235–333.