Guest seminar: Professor Raymond Yeung

Inequalities Revisited

We are delighted to announce our 2025/26 seminar series starts on 23 Sept 2025 with YEUNG Wai Ho Raymond – recipient of the 2021 Hamming Medal and the 2022 Shannon Award, Professor of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Co-Director of the Institute of Network Coding (an academic partner of INFORMED AI). Professor Yeung will talk about his recently published paper:  Inequalities Revisited

Abstract:  In the past over two decades, very fruitful results have been obtained in information theory in the study of the Shannon entropy. This study has led to the discovery of a new class of constraints on the Shannon entropy called non-Shannon-type inequalities. Intimate connections between the Shannon entropy and different branches of mathematics including group theory, combinatorics, Kolmogorov complexity, probability, matrix theory, etc, have been established. All these discoveries were based on a formality introduced for constraints on the Shannon entropy, which suggested the possible existence of constraints that were not previously known. We assert that the same formality can be applied to inequalities beyond information theory. To illustrate the ideas, we revisit through the lens of this formality three fundamental inequalities in mathematics: the AM-GM inequality in algebra, Markov’s inequality in probability theory, and the Cauchy-Scharwz inequality for inner product spaces. Applications of this formality have the potential of leading to the discovery of new inequalities and constraints in different branches of mathematics.

The seminar will be held in person at the School of Mathematics, University of Bristol.  There is also an option to join online via Teams link.  Please get in touch via informed-ai@bristol.ac.uk by 22 September 2025 to express interest in joining online.