ACO Seminar - Veit Elser
November 12, 2026 3:00PM—4:00PM
Location:
In Person
-
Wean Hall 8220
Speaker:
VEIT ELSER,
Professor, Department of Physics, Cornell University
https://physics.cornell.edu/veit-elser
Greed is a great instinct for solving problems. Its geometrical analog is a projection. Say your problem has many variables. It's always possible to let them live in a continuous space, and define solutions to your problem as some subset in that space. A projection is the greedy operation of moving an arbitrary point to the set as efficiently as possible — by the least Euclidean distance. For many kinds of sets, even discrete and other highly non-convex ones, the projection computations are easy. Of course we know that cannot be the case when the task at hand is truly hard. Fortunately, even hard problems can be formulated as finding a point in the intersection of two sets, where projecting to each set individually is easy. This talk describes a general method that uses two easy projections, iteratively, to solve hard problems. After some history I will go over several examples, including sudoku, square packing, and data clustering. Problem requests will be considered if received (at ve10@cornell.edu) at least one week before the talk.
4:00 pm ⇢ Jane Street-sponsored tea and cookies in the math lounge, Wean 6220 (bring your mug).
For More Information:
rkrueger@andrew.cmu.edu