As the semester and the year draw to a close, we have one last talk for you this year! Prof. Vishnu Narayanan (IEOR, IIT Bombay) will take us on a journey from the lumpy to the smooth. We look forward to seeing you there.
Venue: LH 101
Date: Wednesday, October 28th 2026 (5:30 PM, snacks followed by stories )
Title: When Many Wrongs Make (Almost) a Right
Abstract: You can't take half a course, buy a third of a car, or send part of a data packet. Many real-life choices are all-or-nothing, and that makes them hard to work with mathematically. But something surprising happens when lots of people make these lumpy choices at once: the combined result starts to behave as if everything could be split smoothly.
This idea is captured by the Shapley–Folkman theorem, a beautiful result about what happens when you add up many "bumpy" shapes: the more you add, the closer the total gets to a nice, smooth one. We'll build intuition for this through simple pictures and examples, then see it in action, from fairly assigning seats in popular university courses to judging how good our solutions are when managing congested networks. No advanced background is needed, just curiosity!
Kindly RSVP if you do plan to join for the talk, as this will immensely help us with controlling food wastage. Please RSVP at https://forms.gle/VAJHf4w5mGh5kxgN9
For more information, visit the IEOR Talks Series website.