Texas A&M University, Department of Mathematics, 216 Milner Hall, 7th of March 2007, 3:00-3:50

Groups and Dynamics Seminar


A question about finite groups and the complexity of matrix multiplication

Joseph Landsberg of Texas A&M University

This will be a purely expository talk on the work of Cohn and Umans. They show that one could prove that nxn matrices can (as n goes to infinity) be multiplied using on the order of n^2 multiplications (as opposed to the ususal n^3, and the proven n^{2.38}) if one could find finite groups having a property they call the "triple product property". I will explain their work with the hope that someone in the audience might be able to resolve their conjecture.