- Series
- ACO Student Seminar
- Time
- Friday, November 16, 2018 - 1:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 005
- Speaker
- Mark Rudelson – Math, University of Michigan – rudelson@umich.edu – http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rudelson/
- Organizer
- He Guo
Consider a linear combination of independent identically distributed random variables $X_1, . . . , X_n$ with fixed weights $a_1, . . . a_n$. If the random variablesare continuous, the sum is almost surely non-zero. However, for discrete random variables an exact cancelation may occur with a positive probability. Thisprobability depends on the arithmetic nature of the sequence $a_1, . . . a_n$. We will discuss how to measure the relevant arithmetic properties and how to evaluate the probability of the exact and approximate cancelation.