Talk by Dana Moshkovitz: The Unique Games Conjecture – Proved (!!?)

In my “Mathocalypse” post, I mentioned that my wife Dana—who’s been working on Subhash Khot’s Unique Games Conjecture since ~2009, for the entire time I’ve known her—has for the past few weeks (while on sabbatical at the Simons Institute in Berkeley) been spending essentially all of her time laboring to understand OpenAI’s recent proof of the conjecture. Having now studied the proof closely in collaboration with Subhash Khot himself, Johan Håstad, Dor Minzer, and other colleagues, and (naturally) GPT-6 Astra, Dana probably now understands this crown jewel of OpenAI’s release as well as anyone does. This week, she gave two well-received whiteboard talks on the proof at Simons Institute. So, I and others encouraged her to give the same talks next week at UT Austin when she’s back here, and Dana agreed! Because of the large timely interest, we’re going to do a live Zoom option, and will also record the talk for later sharing on YouTube. Please note: While all are welcome, this is a…