Group theory and the Graph Isomorphism problem

Series
ACO Distinguished Lecture
Time
Tuesday, January 10, 2017 - 11:05am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Klaus 1116
Speaker
Laszlo Babai – University of Chicago
Organizer
Robin Thomas

Please Note: This lecture is part of ACO25, a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ACO Program. For more details about the conference please visit http://aco25.gatech.edu/

In this talk we outline the core group theoretic routine, the "Local Certificates" algorithm, underlying the new Graph Isomorphism test. The basic strategy follows Luks's group-theoretic divide-and-conquer approach (1980). We address the bottleneck of Luks's technique via local-global interaction based on a new group theoretic lemma. Undergraduate-level familiarity with the basic concept of group theory (homomorphism, kernel, quotient group, permutation groups) will be assumed.