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

Goodwin Hall 125

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.