May 18 – 22, 2026
Virginia Tech
America/New_York timezone

The factorization norm and an inverse theorem for MaxCut

May 19, 2026, 4:10 PM
25m
Goodwin Hall 125 (Virginia Tech)

Goodwin Hall 125

Virginia Tech

Minisymposium Talk Spectral Graph Theory Spectral Graph Theory

Speaker

Igor Balla (Leipzig University)

Description

In this talk, we will present a proof of the fact that Boolean matrices with bounded $\gamma_2$-norm or bounded normalized trace norm must contain a linear-sized all-ones or all-zeros submatrix, verifying a conjecture of Hambardzumyan, Hatami, and Hatami. We will also discuss further structural results about Boolean matrices of bounded $\gamma_2$-norm and applications in communication complexity, operator theory, spectral graph theory, and extremal combinatorics.

As a key application, we establish a theorem for MaxCut which contrasts a celebrated result of Edwards. In particular, we show that if the MaxCut of a graph with $m$ edges is at most $m/2 + O(\sqrt{m})$, then it must contain a clique of size $\Omega(\sqrt{m})$.

Authors

Igor Balla (Leipzig University) Istvan Tomon (Umeå university) Dr Lianna Hambardzumyan (University of Copenhagen)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.