Chandra Nair is an assistant professor with the information engineering department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include information theory and random combinatorial optimization problems. Chandra Nair was a Stanford graduate fellow (00-04) and Microsoft graduate fellow (04-05) during his graduate studies at Stanford University. Subsequently, he became a post-doc with the theory group at Microsoft research (theory group), Redmond. He joined the faculty of information engineering department of the Chinese university of Hong Kong in Fall 2007.

Date:	15:50-16:30, Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Venue:	FIT Building 1-315, Tsinghua University

Title:	The proof of the Ranndom Energy Model(REM) conjecture in the number partitioning problem

Speaker:	Chandra Nair

Biography:	Chandra Nair is an assistant professor with the information engineering department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include information theory and random combinatorial optimization problems. Chandra Nair was a Stanford graduate fellow (00-04) and Microsoft graduate fellow (04-05) during his graduate studies at Stanford University. Subsequently, he became a post-doc with the theory group at Microsoft research (theory group), Redmond. He joined the faculty of information engineering department of the Chinese university of Hong Kong in Fall 2007.

Abstract:	In this talk I will present the REM conjecture and a motivation behind it for the partition problem. I will then present a very brief outline of our proof technique for this fascinating conjecture. This is joint work with: Christian Borgs, Jennifer Chayes, and Stefan Mertens