We meet Tuesdays 3:00–4:00pm at the CUNY Graduate Center. If you are interested in joining our mailing list, please contact Matthew Junge.

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Seminar Schedule

February 11: Evita Nestoridi (Stony Brook)

Shuffling via transpositions. In their seminal work, Diaconis and Shahshahani proved that shuffling a deck of n cards sufficiently well via random transpositions takes 1/2 n log n steps. Their argument was algebraic and relied on the combinatorics of the symmetric group. In this talk, I will focus on two other shuffles, generalizing random transpositions and I will discuss the underlying combinatorics for understanding their mixing behavior and indeed proving cutoff. The talk will be based on joint works with A. Yan and S. Arfaee.

February 25: Josh Meisel (CUNY)

Cutoff for activated random walk. Self-organized criticality (SOC) is an influential theory that explains how critical behavior, like that seen in lab-tuned phase transitions, occurs throughout nature despite no apparent external tuning. The originally proposed model for SOC, the abelian sandpile, was gradually disqualified primarily due to slow mixing. Activated random walk (ARW) is a stochastic variant of the abelian sandpile conjectured to remedy this and other issues. We prove that ARW on an interval mixes as desired in a model of SOC; it exhibits cutoff at a time proportional to the critical density for ARW on Z. Based on joint work with Chris Hoffman, Toby Johnson and Matt Junge.

March 4: Roger Van Peski (Columbia)

Integer random matrices, fluctuations of random groups, and an interacting particle system. I will discuss recent work with Hoi Nguyen (https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03099 ) on products of discrete random matrices with iid integer entries from any non-degenerate distribution. Roughly speaking, the analogues of singular values for these products converge to the single-time marginal distribution of an interacting particle system, the reflecting Poisson sea. I will also discuss the technique we developed to show this, which is a general-purpose ‘rescaled moment method’ for fluctuations of random abelian groups.

March 11: James MacLaurin (NJIT)

Kinetic Theory for High-Dimensional Models of Interacting Neurons. I study high-dimensional interacting particle models inspired by Neuroscience. Some of the specific features include (i) a disordered and sparse connectivity structure, (ii) delays in the interactions, and (iii) very strong interactions that can be both excitatory and inhibitory. I determine the large N kinetic limit for these systems, and I conduct a bifurcation analysis to determine the existence of patterns, waves and limit cycle oscillations in the kinetic limit. This work involves contributions from Daniele Avitabile and Pedro Vilanova.

March 18: Bhargav Narayana (Rutgers)

Littlewood–Offord sans Fourier. Given unit vectors v_1,…,v_n in Euclidean space, what can we say about the probability that a randomly-signed sum of these vectors lands in a small (say unit) ball around the origin? It turns out that both the natural problems here, namely, finding optimal upper bounds and finding optimal lower bounds for this “small-ball” probability, are quite interesting. The strongest results for both problems have typically come from harmonic analysis; in this talk, I’ll share some recently-developed (elementary) techniques that do just as well (and occasionally better).

March 25: Pranav Chinmay (CUNY)

Robust construction of the incipient infinite cluster in high-dimensional percolation. The incipient infinite cluster was first proposed by physicists in the 1970s as a canonical example of a two-dimensional medium on which random walk is subdiffusive. It is the measure obtained in critical percolation by conditioning on the existence of an infinite cluster, which is a probability zero event. Kesten presented the first rigorous two-dimensional construction of this object as a weak limit of the one-arm event. In high dimensions, van der Hofstad and Jarai constructed the IIC as a weak limit of the two-point connection using the lace expansion. Our work presents a new high-dimensional construction which is “robust”, establishing that the weak limit is independent of the choice of conditioning. The main tools used are Kesten’s original two-dimensional construction combined with Kozma and Nachmias’ regularity method. Our robustness allows for several applications, such as the explicit computation of the limiting distribution of the chemical distance, which forms the content of our upcoming project. This is joint work with Shirshendu Chatterjee, Jack Hanson, and Philippe Sosoe.

April 1: Alisa Knizel (Barnard)

Random Lozenge Waterfall: Dimensional Collapse of Gibbs Measures. I will discuss a two-parameter family of random lozenge tilings related to the q-Racah orthogonal polynomials. The model is a generalization of the uniform and q-weighted random tilings and due to the presence of additional parameters it displays a new interesting behavior. In particular, I will explain a new phenomenon that can be observed in the so-called waterfall region, where two-dimensional pure states collapse into one dimension.

April 8: Evan Sorensen (Columbia)

April 22: David Sivakoff (Ohio State)

April 29: Vittoria Silvestri (Sapienza Università di Roma)

May 6: Christine Chang (CUNY)

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CUNY Probabilists: Louis-Pierre Arguin, Christian Benes, Shirshendu Chatterjee, Olympia Hadjiliadis, Jack Hanson, Tobias Johnson, Matthew Junge, Elena Kosygina, Yanghui Liu, Ivan Matic, Jay Rosen, Indranil SenGupta