BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:researchseminars.org CALSCALE:GREGORIAN X-WR-CALNAME:researchseminars.org BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Jamie Tucker-Foltz (Harvard University) DTSTART:20220414T141500Z DTEND:20220414T160000Z DTSTAMP:20260422T065638Z UID:CJCS/71 DESCRIPTION:Title: Po litical Redistricting\, Graph Partition Sampling\, and Counting Spanning T rees\nby Jamie Tucker-Foltz (Harvard University) as part of Copenhagen -Jerusalem Combinatorics Seminar\n\n\nAbstract\nSay you are handed a 10 X 10 grid graph and are asked to "randomly" partition the vertices into 10 c onnected subgraphs of 10 vertices each. How do you do it? From a complexit y perspective\, the asymptotic version of this question is largely unanswe red\, and even for these small specific parameters there are some very bas ic things we don't know how to do efficiently.\n\nThe primary motivation f or these questions comes from an increasingly popular paradigm for fairnes s in political redistricting whereby electoral maps are judged in comparis on to ensembles of randomly generated maps. This is a truly amazing area w here mathematical theorems are actually having a positive societal impact\ , and the primary goal of this talk will be to inspire more interest in it . I'll focus on a recent paper of mine (https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13394) that sheds light on one particular angle\, but I will also discuss several tantalizing questions I was unable to answer\, and are still very widely open.\n LOCATION:https://researchseminars.org/talk/CJCS/71/ END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR