Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing
Hyperdeterminants and Triangulations of the 4-cube
Algebra & Discrete Mathematics| Speaker: | Peter Huggins, UC Berkeley |
| Location: | 1147 MSB |
| Start time: | Thu, May 25 2006, 12:10PM |
Description
Hyperdeterminants, in the sense of Gelfand, Kapranov and Zelevinsky, are
generalizations of determinants to higher tensors, and are intimately
related to triangulations of products of simplices. Applications of
hyperdeterminants abound, from quantum information theory to computational
biology. Yet despite their potential uses, hyperdeterminants of modest
format still present major computational challenges. After touring the
relevant background, we report on recent computational advances regarding
the 2x2x2x2-hyperdeterminant, its Newton polytope, and the secondary
polytope of the 4-cube. (Joint work with Debbie Grier, Bernd Sturmfels,
and Josephine Yu)