A merger is a probabilistic procedure which extracts the
randomness out of any (arbitrarily correlated) set of random
variables, as long as one of them is uniform. Our main result is
an efficient, simple, optimal (to constant factors) merger, which,
for $k$ random vairables on $n$ bits each, uses a ... more >>>

The finite field Kakeya problem deals with the way lines in different directions can overlap in a vector space over a finite field. This problem came up in the study of certain Euclidean problems and, independently, in the search for explicit randomness extractors. We survey recent progress on this problem ... more >>>