Probability Seminar: Avi Levy

When a child randomly paints a coloring book, adjacent regions receive distinct colors whereas distant regions remain independent. It took mathematicians until 2014 to replicate this effect, when Holroyd and Liggett discovered the first stationary k-dependent q-colorings. In this talk, I will discuss an extension of Holroyd and Liggett's construction which associates a canonical insertion procedure to every finite graph. The known colorings turn out to be diamonds in the rough: apart from multipartite analogues, they are the only k-dependent processes which arise from finite graphs in this manner. Time permitting, I will present extensions of these results to weighted graphs and shifts of finite type. Joint work with Alexander Holroyd.