Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing
Optimization and sums of squares modulo an ideal
Student-Run Discrete Mathematics| Speaker: | Cynthia Vinzant, UC Berkeley |
| Location: | 2112 MSB |
| Start time: | Thu, May 21 2009, 1:10PM |
Description
Working with sums of squares of polynomials modulo an ideal is a
common relaxation for the set of polynomials that are nonnegative on
its real variety. The geometry of the variety has a large impact on
the quality of this relaxation, for example whether or not we need
terms of unbounded degree to represent all positive linear polynomials
as sums of squares mod our ideal. I'll give a brief introduction to
real algebraic geometry and its relation to this problem and
semidefinite programming.