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Deciding polyhedrality of spectrahedra

Algebra & Discrete Mathematics

Speaker: Raman Sanyal, UC Berkeley
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Thu, May 5 2011, 4:10PM

Spectrahedra are to semidefinite programming what polyhedra are to linear programming. Spectrahedra form a rich class of convex bodies with many of the favorable properties of polyhedra. It is a theoretical interesting and practically relevant question to decide when a spectrahedron is a polyhedron. In this talk I will discuss an algorithm for doing that which requires a good understanding of the geometry of spectrahedra and some linear algebra. Only knowledge of the latter will be assumed.