Loeb Lecture: Sets, sums, and machines that do math

Abstract: The game of Set is a simple but addictive card game played with a special 81-card deck. A standard "folklore question" among players of this game is: what is the largest number of cards that can be on the table which do not allow a legal play? I'll explain how this question, which seems to be about cards, leads to a rich family of questions about arithmetic and geometry.  And I’ll talk about some brand-new work with researchers at Google DeepMind where we deployed large language models to make progress on these problems, which raises interesting questions about how the interaction between human mathematicians and machines will work in the near future.

Relevant reading:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/set-proof-stuns-mathematicians-20160531/

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/funsearch-making-new-discoveries-i...

Host: Wanlin Li

There will be a reception in Room 200 (Lounge) at 3:30 before this event.