  Random projections are random linear maps, sampled from appropriate
distributions, that approx- imately preserve certain geometrical invariants so
that the approximation improves as the dimension of the space grows. The
well-known Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma states that there are random ma- trices
with surprisingly few rows that approximately preserve pairwise Euclidean
distances among a set of points. This is commonly used to speed up algorithms
based on Euclidean distances. We prove that these matrices also preserve other
quantities, such as the distance to a cone. We exploit this result to devise a
probabilistic algorithm to solve linear programs approximately. We show that
this algorithm can approximately solve very large randomly generated LP
instances. We also showcase its application to an error correction coding
problem.
