To participate in this seminar, please register HERE.

How many times should one shuffle a deck of cards? We will introduce the cutoff phenomenon, a mysterious sharp phase transition in the convergence to equilibrium of some Markov chains/processes. We will discuss concrete examples such as riffle shuffles, random transpositions, diffusion on Lie groups, as well as some general techniques.

This seminar is for postdocs and PhD students, and we kindly ask faculty not to attend.

Seminar Series Description 50.6 KB application/pdf