Talks
Fall 2020

Projections of Probability Distributions: A Measure-Theoretic Dvoretzky Theorem

Monday, October 19th, 2020, 11:30 am12:25 pm

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Speaker: 

Elizabeth Meckes, Case Western Reserve University

Location: 

Zoom

Dvoretzky's theorem tells us that if we put an arbitrary norm on n-dimensional Euclidean space, no matter what that normed space is like, if we pass to subspaces of dimension about log(n), the space looks pretty much Euclidean. A related probabistic/measure-theoretic phenomenon has long been observed: the (one dimensional) marginals of many natural high-dimensional probability distributions look about Gaussian. A natural question is whether this phenomenon persists for k-dimensional marginals for k growing with n, and if so, for how large a k? In this talk I will discuss a result showing that the phenomenon does indeed persist if k less than 2log(n)/log(log(n)), and that this bound is sharp.

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