Date: Tuesday, 6 Nisan 5766 (April 4, '06)

Speaker: Ehud Friedgut (Hebrew University)

Title: "On the robustness of dictatorships, spectral methods"

Abstract:
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The Erdos-Ko-Rado theorem is perhaps the most fundamental theorem in
extremal set theory. It characterizes the structure and size of a maximal
intersecting family of sets. In this talk we show that this
characterization, and similar ones, are robust: any intersecting family
that is close to maximal size is also close to having the structure
guaranteed by the EKR theorem.

We use spectral methods and rely on some recent results concerning Boolean
functions on the discrete cube.

The talk will (hopefully) be essentially self contained.