Institute Launches Breakthroughs Lecture Series Highlighting Major Advances in the Field

The Simons Institute is delighted to announce the launch of Breakthroughs, a lecture series highlighting major new developments in theoretical computer science. 

The Breakthroughs series will kick off on June 16 with a talk by Virginia Vassilevska Williams from MIT, who recently developed the fastest method to date for multiplying two matrices, in collaboration with Josh Alman from Harvard. Virginia’s talk is titled A Refined Laser Method and Faster Matrix Multiplication.

The second talk in the series will take place on August 5. Yuansi Chen, an assistant professor at Duke University, made substantial progress last year toward proving the Kannan-Lovász-Simonovits (KLS) conjecture and, with it, the Bourgain slicing conjecture. His Breakthroughs talk is titled An Almost Constant Lower Bound of the Isoperimetric Coefficient in the KLS Conjecture.

Both of our summer Breakthroughs talks will be held online via Zoom webinar at 10 a.m. Pacific time. We look forward to holding the series on-site at Calvin Lab (with opportunities for remote participation) beginning in the fall.