RECENT RESULTS ON CARDINALITY ESTIMATION AND INFORMATION THEORETIC INEQUALITIES

I would like to dedicate this little exposition to Prof. Phan Dinh Dieu, one of the giants and pioneers of Mathematics in Computer Science in Vietnam. In the past 15 years or so, new and exciting connections between fundamental problems in database theory and information theory have emerged. There are several angles one can take to describe this connection. This paper takes one such angle, influenced by the author's own bias and research results. In particular, we will describe how the cardinality estimation problem -- a corner-stone problem for query optimizers -- is deeply connected to information theoretic inequalities. Furthermore, we explain how inequalities can also be used to derive a couple of classic geometric inequalities such as the Loomis-Whitney inequality. A purpose of the article is to introduce the reader to these new connections, where theory and practice meet in a wonderful way. Another objective is to point the reader to a research area with many new open questions.

Islands in cosmology

A quantum extremal island suggests that a region of spacetime is encoded in the quantum state of another system, like the encoding of the black hole interior in Hawking radiation. We study conditions for islands to appear in general spacetimes, with or without black holes. They must violate Bekenstein’s area bound in a precise sense, and the boundary of an island must satisfy several other information-theoretic inequalities. These conditions combine to impose very strong restrictions, which we apply to cosmological models. We find several examples of islands in crunching universes. In particular, in the four-dimensional FRW cosmology with radiation and a negative cosmological constant, there is an island near the turning point when the geometry begins to recollapse. In a two-dimensional model of JT gravity in de Sitter spacetime, there are islands inside crunches that are encoded at future infinity or inside bubbles of Minkowski spacetime. Finally, we discuss simple tensor network toy models for islands in cosmology and black holes.