During Fall 2022, we held three groups, each focused on a different topic within TCS. The groups were: A Theorist's Toolkit, Graph Theory, and Formal Semantics of Programming Languages. Each group was run by an undergraduate student organizer along with a graduate student mentor.
Please see the descriptions and tables below for a summary and the list of talks for each of the groups.
This was the fifth iteration of the TCS seminar. The seminar was run by Alex Lindenbaum.
Organizer: Yunya. Graduate student mentor: Shivam.
Description: We followed the great CMU course of the same name and "took a random walk through various mathematical topics that come in handy for theoretical computer science."| Date | Topic | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| September 29th | Asymptotics | Yunya |
| October 6th | Probability | Shivam |
| October 13th | Probability | Shivam |
| October 20th | Spectral Graph Theory | Ekene |
| October 27th | Spectral Graph Theory | Shiv |
| November 3rd | Boolean Functions and their Analysis | Yunya |
| November 10th | Fields and Polynomials | Yuhao |
| November 17th | Probabilistically Checkable Proofs | Ryan |
Organizer: Remy and Ari. Graduate student mentor: Hantao.
Description: We worked through Diestel's book on Graph Theory starting with the very fundamentals and working towards topics such as Extremal Graph Theory and Ramsey numbers.
| Resource | Title | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Diestel | Graph Theory | Link (access on Columbia WiFi) |
| Date | Topic | Discussion Leader | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|
Organizer: Adiba. Graduate student mentor: John.
Description: We carved out a mathematical theory for understanding and reasoning about how computer programs behave at the level of functions. We introduced and developed the lambda calculus - a model for computation that is "the same but different" as the Turing machine - and applied it to evaluation order, types, and other topics in programming language theory.
| Resource | Title | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Date | Topic | Discussion Leader | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|