Speaker: Louis Billera, Cornell
Title: Confessions of an Erstwhile Game Theorist
Time: 2:30 PM, Monday, January 28, 2013
Place: Malott 206
Abstract:
This speaker started his career as a cooperative game theorist with only a side interest in combinatorics. It turns out that some of the ideas learned from other game theorists proved useful in later studies in the theory of convex polytopes. We give two examples of such ideas. One, coming from a paper in stochastic games, was very helpful in half the proof of the g-theorem. The other, coming from a paper on continuous economic markets, provided the basic idea underlying the construction of fiber polytopes. The moral of the story is that you never can tell what might be useful someday.