Math 262A
Combinatorics: Circuit Complexity
Fall 2013

Instructor:
    Sam Buss
    Email: sbuss@math.ucsd.edu
    Office: APM 6210.
    Office phone: 858-534-6455.
    Voice mail: 858-792-9674.
    Cell phone: 858 then 442 then 2877.
    Skype ID: SamBussSkype.

Extra class meeting: Monday, November 25, 3:30-5:00pm in APM 5829

Office hours: Monday 1:00-1:50, Wednesday 2:00-2:50; or by appointment, or just drop by.

Overview: This topics course will be an introduction to circuit complexity, especially lower bounds on circuit complexity. Circuit complexity studies the minimum size of circuits required to compute Boolean functions, and has close connections with many open problems in computational course will briefly discuss connections to uniform (Turing machine) computation, but will focus primarily on the combinatorial aspects of circuit complexity both lower bounds and upper bounds. Initial topics to be covered include: Shannon-Riordan-Lupanov upper and lower bounds, formula shrinkage (Subbotovskaya, Andreev, Hastad, etc.), switching lemmas (Hastad, etc.). The later part of the course will cover some selected upper bounds, algebraic methods, and probabilistic circuits.
    There are no particular prerequisites beyond a certain level of mathematical maturity. It is expected that students will have graduate standing in mathematics or computer science or a related field.

Course schedule: Wednesday and Friday, 3:30-4:50, APM B412.

Scribe notes:
(Latex sources available by using *.tex instead of *.pdf in URL filename.)

Supplemental reading and other resources: