Ian Charlesworth

This is a reading group to discuss the paper MIP*=RE of Zhengfeng Ji, Anand Natarajan, Thomas Vidick, John Wright, and Henry Yuen which, among other things, resolves the Connes Embedding Problem. This is a pretty exciting result — not least because CEP has been a longstanding major open problem — and a lot of the techniques used come from complexity theory and quantum information theory. The goal will be to review the techniques in the paper, including a lot of the background which may be unfamiliar to a pure mathematical audience, as well as its connections to operator algebras.

We are meeting on Fridays from 14:00-15:30 in room 116 of the Simons Institute. (Those not familiar with "Berkeley time" should be warned that for arcane reasons, 14:00 actually means 14:10.) Thomas Vidick and Henry Yuen have provided some suggested notes on what topics to cover and in what order, which may be found here. There is now also a Wiki related to the paper at http://mipstar.henryyuen.net/.

COVID-19 Due to the threat of COVID-19, we will suspend in-person meetings until the Berkeley campus as a whole resumes such meetings. Instead, we will meet using the video-conferencing program Zoom. A link to the weekly meeting is here, and we will still meet at the usual time from 14:00-15:30 on Fridays. Some brief instructions about how to join a Zoom meeting can be found, e.g., in this 50-second YouTube video (although it is fairly self-explanatory).

Scheduling Update: As of June 12, we will be meeting at 8:00 AM PDT, still on Fridays (and still respecting "Berkeley time").

A list of topics covered and presenters is below: