Monday 18 February, 8:30PM
Sum-of-squares proofs
Dr Hamza Fawzi (DAMTP)
A polynomial that is a sum of squares of other polynomials can only take nonnegative values. This trivial observation is surprisingly powerful: many inequalities in mathematics have simple sum-of-squares proofs. I will discuss algorithms that can automatically search for sum-of-squares proofs for polynomial inequalities, and the extent to which they can be considered as “automatic proof machines”.