Date: October 20, 2025
Time: 3:45-5 p.m.
Location: Gates Hall 310 or via Zoom
Speaker: Prasanna Ramakrishnan, Ph.D. student in computer science, Stanford University
Abstract: In 1785, Condorcet established a frustrating property of elections and majority rule: it is possible that, no matter which candidate you pick as the winner, a majority of voters will prefer someone else. You might have the brilliant idea of picking a small set of winners instead of just one, but how do you avoid the nightmare scenario where a majority of the voters prefer some other candidate over all the ones you picked? How many candidates suffice to appease a majority of the voters? In this talk, we will explore this question. Along the way, we will roll some dice — both because the analysis involves randomness and because of a connection to the curious phenomenon of intransitive dice, that has delighted recreational and professional mathematicians alike ever since Martin Gardner popularized it in 1970.
Based on joint work with Moses Charikar, Alexandra Lassota, Adrian Vetta, and Kangning Wang.
Bio: Prasanna Ramakrishnan is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford University, co-advised by Moses Charikar and Li-Yang Tan. He earned a BS in mathematics and an MS in computer science from Stanford in 2020. His research is in theoretical computer science with a focus on computational social choice, and his work has been recognized with a Best Paper Award at SODA 2024.