In-Person and Online Talk

In this lecture three fairly elementary problems will be presented along with their history.

a. Gromov topological overlapping problem.

b. The existence of good locally testable error correcting codes.

c. Are all groups sofic?

While the three problems appear to be unrelated, the following talks will show that they are! The solutions of the first two will be described and a plan of attack on the third.

This talk is a Department Colloquium seminar and the first Minerva Mini-Course lecture this semester. The lectures are aimed at a large audience of mathematicians and computer scientists. An effort will be made that they will indeed be accessible to a large audience. While there will be some connection between the lectures, they can also be seen as fairly independent talks.