Back to Departmental Colloquium: Spring 2022
Departmental Colloquium
Date: Tuesday, Jan 11, 2022
Time: 4:00PM
Location: JWB 335
Geordie Williamson
University of Sydney
Title |
Towards the combinatorial invariance conjecture |
Abstract |
The combinatorial invariance conjecture is a fascinating conjecture in Representation Theory. Basically it says that certain important polynomials are determined in a very non-trivial way by a directed graph. About 2 years ago, I began working on this problem with DeepMind, an AI lab based in London. (DeepMind is famous for their AlphaGo program which was the first program to defeat the best human Go players.) Our goal was to try to discover whether modern Machine Learning techniques are helpful in approaching problems in mathematics. I will outline how the Machine Learning models work, how successful they were and (by far the trickiest part) how we went about extracting new mathematics from these models. The result is a formula which sheds considerable light on the combinatorial invariance conjecture. This is joint work with the DeepMind team: Charles Blundell, Lars Buesing, Alex Davies and Petar Veličković. |
Representation Theory
Combinatorics
Data Science and Machine Learning