Student Probability Seminar

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Random Sorting Networks

Speaker: Alex Rozinov

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 805

Date: Tuesday, March 4, 2014, noon

Synopsis:

In this talk, we will consider a very natural set of random walks on permutations. Despite their apparent simplicity, the combinatorics of these walks is well beyond modern mathematics. The saving grace here is a stunning bijection between these walks and Young tableaux. We shall see striking numerical evidence that these walks are very regular and exhibit truly bizarre connections to a huge current area of research around random matrices, KPZ, random tilings, and determinental processes. We shall see that these walks are intimately related to many branches of math such as algebraic geometry, symmetric function theory, cohomology and even integrable systems. This talk will be completely elementary and assume no prior background. A reference can be found here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0609538v1.pdf