Alan Frieze of Carnegie Mellon University will speak as part of the Howard Rowlee Lecture Series at 4 p.m. March 22 in 115 Avery Hall. A reception will precede at 3 p.m. in 348 Avery Hall.

This lecture will give some simple examples of the use of the probabilistic method. It uses tools from probability to prove the existence of combinatorial objects that can be hard to find deterministically. This idea was pioneered by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, and it is now part of the standard toolkit for combinatorialists.