Leonidas Alaoglu Memorial Lecture

"The power and weakness of randomness (when you are short on time)"

Abstract: 

Man has grappled with the meaning and utility of randomness for centuries. Research in the Theory of Computation in the last thirty years has enriched this study considerably. I'll describe two main aspects of this research on randomness, demonstrating respectively its power and weakness for making algorithms faster. I will also address the role of randomness in other computational settings, such as memory-bounded computation and probabilistic and zero-knowledge proofs. 

No special background will be assumed.