Talks given by students during the year 2026 are listed below.

Fall 2026

EP2603: Can we transmit information, through an adversarial medium, with certainty?

Speaker: Sauparna Kar (M. Stat, 2027)
Abstract: Suppose you are grounded at home for getting bad grades. Now it is the World Cup season and you are an Argentina fan. You need to know the result of the match against England. For that, you ask a friend to cycle past your home and tell you the result. But the catch is that your parents are keeping a strict lookout for such shenanigans. How can you overcome such a situation while not making things worse for yourself? We will look at such kinds of problems in the classical as well as the quantum domain.
Pre-requisites: VM-1 and VM-2, Group Theory (basic definitions, stabilizer, normalizer), Analysis 1 and 2, and some ideas from Analysis 3. Postulates of Quantum Mechanics will be introduced in the talk.
Target Audience: B. Stat, 2nd year onwards
Video: (Not Recorded)
Date and Time: Saturday, 8th August 2026, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Venue: Online (Google Meet)

Speaker: Ahan Chakraborty (B. Stat, 2027)
Abstract: Cayley’s formula establishes that the number of distinct labeled trees on $n$ vertices is exactly $n^{n-2}$. While classical proofs traditionally rely on combinatorial bijections with Prufer codes, double counting, or algebraic graph theory approaches, this talk presents an alternative probabilistic proof by modeling tree generation through a Galton-Watson branching process with a Poisson offspring distribution.
Pre-requisites: All pre-requisites are covered in B1, so B1 students can attend as well.
Video: (Not Recorded)
Date and Time: Sunday, 19th April 2026, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Venue: Online (Google Meet)

Speaker: Srijeet Bhattacharjee (B. Stat, 2026)
Abstract: We will learn the working of RSA cryptography, one of the first public key encryption algorithms, connect the difficulty of decryption to the famous P vs NP problem, and learn Shor’s quantum algorithm that can be used in principle to decrypt RSA code in polynomial time.
Pre-requisites: All pre-requisites are covered in B1, so B1 students can attend as well.
Video: (Not Recorded)
Date and Time: Thursday, 12th March 2026, 4:15 PM - 5:45 PM
Venue: Room 520, 5th Floor, SN Bose Bhavan