English

Interactions of Computational Complexity Theory and Mathematics

Computational Complexity 2017-10-27 v1

Abstract

[This paper is a (self contained) chapter in a new book, Mathematics and Computation, whose draft is available on my homepage at https://www.math.ias.edu/avi/book ]. We survey some concrete interaction areas between computational complexity theory and different fields of mathematics. We hope to demonstrate here that hardly any area of modern mathematics is untouched by the computational connection (which in some cases is completely natural and in others may seem quite surprising). In my view, the breadth, depth, beauty and novelty of these connections is inspiring, and speaks to a great potential of future interactions (which indeed, are quickly expanding). We aim for variety. We give short, simple descriptions (without proofs or much technical detail) of ideas, motivations, results and connections; this will hopefully entice the reader to dig deeper. Each vignette focuses only on a single topic within a large mathematical filed. We cover the following: \bullet Number Theory: Primality testing \bullet Combinatorial Geometry: Point-line incidences \bullet Operator Theory: The Kadison-Singer problem \bullet Metric Geometry: Distortion of embeddings \bullet Group Theory: Generation and random generation \bullet Statistical Physics: Monte-Carlo Markov chains \bullet Analysis and Probability: Noise stability \bullet Lattice Theory: Short vectors \bullet Invariant Theory: Actions on matrix tuples

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.09780,
  title  = {Interactions of Computational Complexity Theory and Mathematics},
  author = {Avi Wigderson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.09780},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

27 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:26:47.594Z