Activities This Week

The Temperley-Lieb algebras are a family of finite dimensional algebras that are quotients of the symmetric groups algebras, or more generally the Iwahori-Hecke algebras. They appear in a number of areas of mathematics, including statistical mechanics, knot theory, quantum groups, and subfactors. We review their representation theory and give some results on an infinite dimensional generalization.

The talk discusses a convexity structure on metric spaces which we call sheltered sets. This structure arises in the study of the dynamics of the maximum cellular automaton over the binary alphabet on finitely generated groups. I will discuss relations to horoballs and dead ends in groups and present many open questions. This is work in progress with Tom Meyerovitch.

A subset S of a group G invariably generates G if for every choice of $g(s)\in G$ ,$s\in S$ the set ${s^g(s):s\in S}$ is a generating set of G. We say that a group G is invariably generated if such S exists, or equivalently if S=G invariably generates G. In this talk, we study invariable generation of Thompson groups. We show that Thompson group F is invariably generated by a finite set, whereas Thompson groups T and V are not invariable generated. This is joint work with Tsachik Gelander and Kate Juschenko.

The sharp threshold phenomenon is a central topic of research in the analysis of Boolean functions. Here, one aims to give sufficient conditions for a monotone Boolean function f to satisfy\mu_p(f)=o(\mu_q(f)), where q = p + o(p), and \mu_p(f) is the probability that f=1 on an input with independent coordinates, each taking the value 1 with probability p.

The dense regime, where \mu_p(f)=\Theta(1), is somewhat understood due to seminal works by Bourgain, Friedgut, Hatami, and Kalai. On the other hand, the sparse regime where \mu_p(f)=o(1) was out of reach of the available methods. However, the potential power of the sparse regime was suggested by Kahn and Kalai already in 2006.

In this talk we show that if a monotone Boolean function f with \mu_p(f)=o(1) satisfies some mild pseudo-randomness conditions then it exhibits a sharp threshold in the interval [p,q], with q = p+o(p). More specifically, our mild pseudo-randomness hypothesis is that the p-biased measure of f does not bump up to Θ(1) whenever we restrict f to a sub-cube of constant co-dimension, and our conclusion is that we can find q=p+o(p), such that \mu_p(f)=o(\mu_q(f)).