6 February 2013, General Mathematics Colloquium, Jop Briët (CWI)

Abstract.
Grothendieck's inequality is a fundamental result to the theory of Banach spaces. But many years after Grothendieck published this result, people realized that it also has important applications in theoretical computer science and physics. In particular, the inequality can be used in quantum information theory to study the mysterious phenomenon of quantum entanglement and in combinatorial optimization to prove performance guarantees of efficient approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems. The aim of this talk is to give an overview of these applications and explain why Grothendieck's inequality and recent generalizations of it are powerful mathematical tools to study them.

The General Mathematics Colloquium homepage can be found at http://www.science.uva.nl/research/math/Calendar/colloq/