Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

This talk will focus on the multifaceted and mutually perpetuating relationship between ergodic theory, combinatorics and number theory. We will begin by discussing Furstenberg’s ergodic approach to Szemerédi’s Theorem and how it has inspired a recent solution to a long-standing sumset conjecture of Erdős. Thereafter, we will explore a new dynamical framework for treating questions in multiplicative number theory. This leads to a variant of the ergodic theorem that contains the Prime Number Theorem as a special case, and reveals an intriguing new connection between the notion of entropy in dynamical systems and the distribution of the number of prime factors of integers.

Gradient descent algorithms and their noisy variants, such as the Langevin dynamics or multi-pass SGD, are at the center of attention in machine learning. Yet their behaviour remains perplexing, in particular in the high-dimensional non-convex setting. In this talk, I will present several high-dimensional and non-convex statistical learning problems in which the performance of gradient-based algorithms can be analysed down to a constant. The common point of these settings is that the data come from a probabilistic generative model leading to problems for which, in the high-dimensional limit, statistical physics provides exact closed solutions for the performance of the gradient-based algorithms. The covered settings include the spiked mixed matrix-tensor model and the phase retrieval.

A finite connected acyclic graph is called a tree. Both properties - connectivity and being acyclic - make very good sense in higher dimensions as well. This has led Gil Kalai (1983) to define the notion of a $d$-dimensional hypertree for $d > 1$. The study of hypertrees is an exciting area of research, and I will try to give you a taste of the many open questions and what we know (and do not know) about them. No specific prior background is assumed.

The talk is based on several papers. The list of coauthors on these papers includes Roy Meshulam, Mishael Rosenthal, Yuval Peled, Lior Aronshtam, Tomsz Luczak, Amir Dahari, Ilan Newman and Yuri Rabinovich.