- Series
- Job Candidate Talk
- Time
- Tuesday, December 5, 2023 - 4:30pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 006
- Speaker
- Benjamin McKenna – Harvard University – bmckenna@fas.harvard.edu – https://www.benjaminmckenna.com
- Organizer
- Christian Houdré
How many critical points does a random function from R^N to R have for large N? Such functions appear naturally in probability, data science, and mathematical physics. Questions like this one, which have attracted longstanding interest from both physicists and mathematicians, can help explain both physical phase transitions and algorithmic thresholds. I will give an overview of this "landscape complexity" program, its motivations, and recent progress coming from random matrices.