This award supports the research of Professor J. Spencer to work in combinatorics. He intends to investigate whether certain probabilistic algorithms can be derandomized to give deterministic ones. He also intends to study threshold functions and Zero-One laws for random structures. The research is in the general area of combinatorics. Combinatorics attempts to find efficient methods to study how discrete collections of objects can be organized. And, so it is extremely important to modern communications, for example the design of large networks as in telephone systems and the design of algorithms in computer science.
