The PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow Seminar: Lucas Teyssier

Consider a poker game where you have to mix the deck of cards between two turns. How (many times) should you shuffle it to prevent any cheating?
In this talk we will introduce the theory of mixing times, and explain how representation theory can be used to study card mixing and diffusions on other objects.

Speaker Biography: Lucas Teyssier is a PIMS-CNRS-Simons Postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia under the sponsorship of Prof. Jonathan Hermon. He completed his PhD at the Universität Wien, Vienna, under the supervision of Prof. Nathanaël Berestycki. While in Vienna, Teyssier and Berestycki worked with Hermon to prove a significant result about the universality of fluctuations of the cover time on vertex-transitive graphs. The three continue to collaborate in this area.

Fascinated by numbers from an early age, Teyssier would often perform computations in his head for fun, learning about group theory and Fourier analysis by the time he was in Lycée du Parc in Lyon. He then studied at ENS Ulm in Paris and Sorbonne Université, where he wrote his master's thesis (on mixing times) under the supervision of Prof. Justin Salez.

Teyssier holds both the CNRS and Simons awards at PIMS. The CNRS Postdoctoral fellowship is targeted to applicants who are French or who have completed their Ph.D. degree in France, while the Simons Fellowship recognizes top postdoctoral researchers at PIMS member institutions.

This event is part of the Emergent Research: The PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow Colloquium Series.