Events

Jinyoung Park

Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU
Colloquia

When

Date: Friday, April 21, 2023
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Petty 150
Dr. Jinyoung Park is a visiting assistant professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU and will start a tenure-track assistant professor position there in September 2023. Before that, she was a Szegö Assistant Professor (postdoc mentor: Jacob Fox) and a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study as (CSDM program, led by Avi Wigderson). Dr. Park received her Ph.D. degree in math at Rutgers University in May 2020 (advisor: Jeff Kahn). Her research interests include extremal and probabilistic combinatorics, asymptotic enumeration, and graph theory.

For a finite set X, a family F of subsets of X is said to be increasing if any set A that contains B in F is also in F. The p-biased product measure of F increases as p increases from 0 to 1, and often exhibits a drastic change around a specific value, which is called a “threshold.” Thresholds of increasing families have been of great historical interest and a central focus of the study of random discrete structures (e.g. random graphs and hypergraphs), with estimation of thresholds for specific properties the subject of some of the most challenging work in the area. In 2006, Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai conjectured that a natural (and often easy to calculate) lower bound q(F) (which we refer to as the “expectation-threshold”) for the threshold is in fact never far from its actual value. A positive answer to this conjecture enables one to narrow down the location of thresholds for any increasing properties in a tiny window. In particular, this easily implies several previously very difficult results in probabilistic combinatorics such as thresholds for perfect hypergraph matchings (Johansson–Kahn–Vu) and bounded-degree spanning trees (Montgomery). In this talk, I will present recent progress on this topic. Based on joint work with Keith Frankston, Jeff Kahn, Bhargav Narayanan, and Huy Tuan Pham.