Some SNAF groups have small diameter (3/22/06)
This was a talk on Harald
Helfgott's excellent result that says that SL_2(p) has uniformly
small diameter for all primes p and all generating sets of SL_2(p). I
had seen Harald talk about this at a workshop
on Expanders at IAS the previous fall, but I didn't appreciate his
work until I struggled to understand his methods. This was a primary
motivating factor in my decision to run a summer seminar on work of Terry Tao and others in Arithmetic Combinatorics.
The thing that I liked most about this talk was that it contained
very little detail. A fancy friend told me that
it was my best talk so far, and I believe he said that because of the
lack of detail.
