Dear quanta, We will not have a group meeting tomorrow since enough people seem to want to go to this talk (announcement below) instead. It is not quantum, but has relevance to computing amplitudes of quantum circuits. Next week we will have Marcus Appleby tell us about the SIC-POVM problem and algebraic number theory. -aram ---------- Forwarded message ---------- *STOCHASTICS AND STATISTICS SEMINAR* *|* *FRIDAY, March 3 11AM-12PM in Room E18-304 * https://stat.mit.edu/events/alexander-barvinok-u-michigan/ https://whereis.mit.edu/?go=E18 *Title: * Computing partition functions by interpolation *Speaker: * Alexander Barvinok (UMICH) http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~barvinok/ *Abstract:* Partition functions are just multivariate polynomials with great many monomials enumerating combinatorial structures of a particular type and their efficient computation (approximation) are of interest for combinatorics, statistics, physics and computational complexity. I’ll present a general principle: the partition function can be efficiently approximated in a domain if it has no complex zeros in a slightly larger domain, and illustrate it on the examples of the permanent of a matrix, the independence polynomial of a graph and, time permitting, the graph homomorphism partition function. *Bio:* Alexander Barvinok is a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is interested in computational complexity and algorithms in algebra, geometry and combinatorics. _______________________________________________ qip mailing list qip(a)mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/qip