Statement of Research Interests

Christopher Williamson 2013

My primary research interests are in the mathematics that form the foundations of theoretical computer science (TCS) a large part of which is in the realms of abstract algebra, combinatorics, and graph theory. Below, I describe the connections between my interests, and their potential for future research at Brown. Group theory expander graphs We begin by exploring the relationship between groups (more specically, their Cayley graphs) and expander graphs. Cayley graphs are dened in terms of some group and a choice of a generating set for that group; expanders are a type of graph that have few edges, yet despite this, are surprisingly well connected (perhaps in the sense that the diameter of the graph is small). A vast amount of research has been conducted to study which groups have a generating set that yields an expanding Cayley graph. An example of this research is the work of Kassabov [1] in which it was proved that every symmetric group has a generating set yielding a Cayley graph that is an expander. Expanders Ramanujan graphs The consideration of expander graphs leads naturally to the study of Ramanujan graphs. In order to understand the denition of Ramanujan graphs, rst note that one way of quantifying how well a k -regular graph holds the expansion property is by looking at the second-largest (by absolute value) eigenvalue, 2 , of its adjacency matrix. This constant, which here I call the expansion constant, is one convenient way of characterizing the expansion property, as graphs with a large spectral gap (typically dened as k 2 ) can be shown to have the property that the probability distribution of the location of a random walker on the graph tends rapidly towards uniform. In fact, the L2 norm of the dierence between the vector representing the probability distribution over the vertices after a t step walk and the uniform distribution vector, (1/n, ..., 1/n), is bounded above t 2 . Having small 2 is a sign that the graph is well connected imagine that in by k the limiting case, we have a complete graph and the location of the walker after even just a single random step is completely unpredictable (but of course, a complete graph is a poor expander due to its large number of edges). This expansion constant is fundamental to the study of spectral graph theory. Many fundamental properies of graphs are related to the expansion constant. For example, the diameter of a connected n-vertex, k -regular 1

graph is bounded above by 1 +

log (n) . log (k)log (2 )

This brings us nally back to Ramanujan graphs, which are optimal expanders in that their spectral gap is as large as possible. Specically, we know that if Gn,k is a family of connected k -regular, n-vertex graphs, then for xed k as n tends to innity, 2 (Gn,k ) 2 k 1 o(1) where 2 (Gn,k ) is the expansion constant. This motivates the denition of Ramanujan graphs as those with expansion constant less than 2 k 1. A current area of research that I nd interesting is the quest to nd k -regular families of Ramanujan graphs for new values of k . Currently, the best result is that of [2, 3], where explicit families of degree pn + 1 are constructed (for p prime and n Z). Whether or not families of other degrees exist is unknown, a fact made more enticing by the fact that, in a certain sense, almost all graphs are almost Ramanujan [4], meaning that for all > 0, a random k -regular graph on n vertices satises 2 2 k 1 + with probability 1 o(1). An exciting new development from this year has demonstrated the existence of bipartite Ramanujan graphs of all degrees greater than two [5]. Expanders extractors Algebra, combinatorics, and graph theory are critical for the creation of extractors, functions commonly studied in theoretical computer science that turn input bits sampled from a weakly-random source (typically quantied by min-entropy), and sometimes a random seed that is as short as possible, into output bits that are very nearly completely random. Demonstrating another surprising connection between pure mathematics and theoretical computer science, the combinatorial study of line-point incidence theorems has proven useful in the creation of extractors. For example, the Szemeredi-Trotter theorem states that: 2 |I (P, L)| = O (|L||P |) 3 + |L| + |P | , where P and L are nite sets of points (resp. lines) in R2 and I (P, L) = {(p, l) P L | p l}. The nite-eld version of this theorem was critical in the creation of Bourgains extractor (see [6, 7]). Graph theory also takes part in the creation of extractors, some of which are constructed by performing random walks on expander graphs. The conceptual reason for this is easy to see: one can associate with each vertex of an expander a string of bits (used as output) and use the input string of bits as dening a walk on the graph. If one then outputs the string of bits associated with the last vertex on the walk, then the fast mixing rate of the expander graph implies that these bits are highly unpredictable after a relatively short walk. Extractors pseudorandom generators Extractors are frequently used in the creation of pseudorandom generators (PSGs). An example of this application of extractors is in [8], where PSGs for regular branching 2

programs are created using the expander random walk extractors created by Goldreich and Wigderson in [9]. Pseudorandom generators are functions that turn a small number of truly random bits into a longer string of bits that cannot be easily distinguished from a random string of that length by some model of computation. Thus, a PSG is a function G : {0, 1}s {0, 1}n such that for some class of functions f , |ExUs [f (G(x))] ExUn [f (x)]| < . The endeavor to improve existing PSGs (by reducing the random seed lengths) and to create PSGs for other models of computation, especially certain classes of circuits, is an active area that I would like to study further. Extractors graph theory By considering a weakened version of an extractor, we will return to graph theory and nd one nal avenue of potential research. A disperser is a weakened extractor in the sense that, rather than requiring the output bits be close to uniform, we only require that the size of the support of the output distribution is large. It is an elementary fact that (and we will refrain from making all necessary denitions for the sake of brevity) if one has a 2-source disperser for weakly-random sources of min-entropy k , then one can use that to eciently construct a bipartite, 2k -Ramsey graph (a j -Ramsey graph is a graph with no cliques or independent sets of size j ). Current constructions of Ramsey graphs vary widely in their complexity. At one end are the highly intricate constructions of Barak, Rao, Shaltiel, and Wigderson [10], and at the other end are the simple FranklWilson constructions [11], which can be described in a few sentences (the complexity of [10] is justied in that the graphs constructed there are j -Ramsey for lower j ). An open task is to nd more explicit and easily understood Ramsey graph constructions that also outperform the Frankl-Wilson construction.

References
[1] M. Kassabov, Symmetric groups and expander graphs, Invent. Math. 170 (2007), no. 2, 327-354. [2] M. Morgenstern, Existence and explicit constructions of q+1 regular Ramanujan graphs for every prime power q, J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 62 (1994), 44-62. [3] A. Lubotzky, B. Samuels and U. Vishne, Explicit constructions of Ramanujan com d , European J. Combin. 26 (2005), no. 6, 965-993. plexes of type A [4] J. Friedman, A proof of Alons second eigenvalue conjecture and related problems, CoRR (2004). [5] A. Marcus, D. Spielman, N. Srivastava, Interlacing Families I: Bipartite Ramanujan Graphs of All Degrees, eprint arXiv:1304.4132 (2013). 3

[6] J. Bourgain. More on the sum-product phenomenon in prime elds and its applications. International Journal of Number Theory, 1:1 - 32, 2005. [7] A. Rao. An Exposition of Bourgains 2-Source Extractor. ECCC (2007). [8] M. Braverman, A. Rao, R. Raz, A. Yehudayo. Pseudorandom Generators for Regular Branching Programs. FOCS 10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 51st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (40-47). [9] Oded Goldreich and Avi Wigderson. Tiny families of functions with random properties: A quality-size trade-o for hashing. Random Struct. Algorithms, 11(4): 315-343, 1997. [10] B. Barak, A. Rao, R. Shaltiel, A. Wigderson. 2-Source Dispersers for Sub-Polynomial Entropy and Ramsey Graphs Beating the Frankl-Wilson Construction. STOC (2006). [11] P. Frankl and R. M. Wilson. Intersection theorems with geometric consequences. Combinatorica, 1(4):357-368, 1981.