A subgraph of an edge-coloured graph is called rainbow if all its edges have distinct colours. The study of rainbow subgraphs  has a long history in discrete mathematics, going back to the 18th century work of Euler on Latin squares. Since then rainbow structures were the focus of extensive research and found numerous applications in design theory and graph decompositions. Many problems in this area can be solved or partially solved by applying probabilistic arguments. In this talk we discuss a few such applications focusing on recent progress on some long-standing open questions.

About speaker:

Benny Sudakov received his PhD from Tel Aviv University in 1999. He had appointments in Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton and in UCLA.  Currently he is a professor of mathematics in ETH, Zurich. Sudakov is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award and Humboldt Research Award. He is an AMS Fellow, member of Academia Europaea and was an invited speaker at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians. His main research interests are combinatorics and its applications to other areas of mathematics and computer science.