Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing
Spectrahedra and their Shadows
Algebra & Discrete Mathematics| Speaker: | Bernd Sturmfels, University of California, Berkeley |
| Related Webpage: | https://math.berkeley.edu/~bernd/ |
| Location: | 2112 MSB |
| Start time: | Thu, Apr 23 2015, 4:00PM |
This lecture concerns the algebraic geometry that underlies semidefinite programming. After a brief discussion of quartic spectrahedra in 3-space, we focus on spectrahedral shadows, that is, convex sets representable by linear matrix inequalities. We characterize the polynomials that vanish on the boundary of a spectrahedral shadow when the defining matrices are generic. The colorful pictures shown in this lecture can be enjoyed by everyone.