Speaker: Dr. Nathan Fox
Location: Canisius College Science Hall, Room 1053.
Title: Kolmogorov Complexity.
Date/Time: Feb. 16 (Wed), 2:30 pm
Abstract: How hard is it to describe a number? Clearly not that hard; you can write down the
number. But, for exceedingly huge numbers, that’s a lot of work. For example, the largest known
prime number is $2^{82589933}-1$. This number has over 24 million digits, but it has a
mathematical description that’s fewer than 20 characters long. In this talk, we will examine
the question, “How difficult is it to describe the number n?” and the implications of this
question and its surprising answer.