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IN-PERSON MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS SEMINAR
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
HILL 705
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COFFEE WILL BE AVAILABLE AT 11:50. THERE WILL BE A BROWN BAG LUNCH AFTER THE SEMINAR.
IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS PLEASE EMAIL ME AT
Bhargav Narayanan – Rutgers University
Date/Time/Location
Thursday, February 8th, 12:00pm; Hill Center 705
Random Reconstruction in Two Dimensions
Suppose that we only see small “k x k snapshots” of a random two-dimensional “n x n picture”: can we piece the original picture back together? The one-dimensional problem motivating this question is precisely the very widely studied one of shotgun sequencing DNA. Motivated by the shotgun sequencing problem, Mossel and Ross raised several interesting questions (like the one aforementioned) about reconstructing random structures from “small snapshots” in two (and higher) dimensions. In this talk, I will sketch how we can now answer some of these two-dimensional reconstruction questions: in particular, it turns out that the answer to the problem mentioned above exhibits somewhat surprising “two-point concentration,” and getting to this answer involves some methods from mathematical physics, namely, entropic considerations and contour arguments.