Date: Friday, February 6, 2015
Location: Maxwell Dworkin G115, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138
Speakers: Brian Hayes, IACS Associate
Time: Lunch 12:30pm; talk 1:00pm
Title: Orderly Randomness: Quasirandom Numbers and Quasi–Monte Carlo
Abstract: Modern computing has an insatiable appetite for randomness. Cryptography and
other kinds of adversarial computation demand “true” random numbers, which have three key
properties: They are unpredictable, uncorrelated, and unbiased. Most other applications
rely on pseudorandom numbers, which give up unpredictability but are still uncorrelated
and unbiased. A third kind of randomness is even weaker. Quasirandom numbers are neither
unpredictable nor uncorrelated; they claim only to be unbiased. They don’t even “look”
random. Nevertheless, in some circumstances quasirandom numbers seem to be superior to
pseudorandom ones. For example, they allow faster convergence or better error bounds in
certain Monte Carlo simulations. Although quasirandom numbers have been known since the
1950s, some of their useful properties have been recognized only in the past few years,
and they are not yet fully understood. Free and open to the public. No registration
required.
Speaker Bio: Brian Hayes is Senior Writer and columnist for American Scientist magazine
and an Associate of SEAS. He writes mainly on mathematical and computational themes both
for American Scientist and for his weblog
bit-player.org<http://bit-player.org/>g/>. In
the 1970s and 80s he was an editor of Scientific American, and later he edited American
Scientist. He has been a visitor at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in
Berkeley and at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. A collection
of Hayes’s columns, titled Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical
Diversions<http://grouptheoryinthebedroom.com/>m/>, was published by Hill and Wang in
2008. He is also the author of Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial
Landscape<http://industrial-landscape.com/index.html> (W. W. Norton, 2005; second
edition 2014).
***********************
UPCOMING SEMINARS
2/13 Ray Jones (IACS Lecturer) on "Connectomics: extracting neural connectivity
from very large data sets"
Click
here<https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events> to subscribe
to our events list.
_______________________________________________
Iacs-events mailing list
Iacs-events(a)seas.harvard.edu
https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events