Event time:
Thursday, February 2, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm
Location:
LOM 205
Speaker:
Benjamin Sudakov
Speaker affiliation:
EtH Zurich
Event description:
A family of lines through the origin in Euclidean space is called equiangular if any pair of lines defines the same angle. The problem of estimating the maximum cardinality of such a family in $\mathbb{R}^n$ was extensively studied for the last 70 years. Answering a question of Lemmens and Seidel from 1973, in this talk we show that for every fixed angle $\theta$ and sufficiently large $n$ there are at most $2n-2$ lines in $\mathbb{R}^n$ with common angle $\theta$.
Moreover, this is achievable only when $\theta =\arccos \frac{1}{3}$.
Various extensions of this result to the more general settings of lines with $k$ fixed angles and of spherical codes will be discussed as well. Joint work with I. Balla, F. Drexler and P. Keevash.