Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The Probabilistic Method is a powerful tool for tackling many problems in discrete mathematics and related areas. Roughly speaking, its basic idea can be described as follows. In order to prove existence of a combinatorial structure with certain properties, we construct an appropriate probability space, and show that a randomly chosen element of this space has the desired property with positive probability. In this talk we shall give a gentle introduction to the Probabilistic Method, with an emphasis on examples.