University of Washington

Probability theory is concerned with regularities in random processes, such as laws of large numbers and limit-shape theorems. Recent work by researchers at the interface between probability and combinatorics shows that many of these regularities...

The Pacific Northwest Geometry Seminar (PNGS) is a regional meeting for geometers of all kinds. It is held every fall and spring, and every other winter, rotating among the following participating institutions: Oregon State University Portland State...

Participants will have the opportunity to do some subset of the following: 1. give a talk about their research or a topic of interest. 2. collaborate with other grad students in planning topics and pre-lectures. 3. attend lectures outlining current...

Northwest Probability Seminars are one-day mini-conferences held at the University of Washington or Microsoft Research and organized in collaboration with the Oregon State University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon.

The Ising model, one of the most studied models in mathematical physics, was introduced in 1925 to model ferromagnetism. Over the last three decades, significant effort has been dedicated to the analysis of stochastic dynamical systems that both...

Polynomial optimization concerns minimizing a polynomial subject to polynomial equations and inequalities. While this is a natural model for many applications, there are many difficulties (usually numerical and algorithmic) that have prevented their...

Increasingly, we are confronted with very high dimensional data sets. As a result, methods of avoiding the curse of dimensionality have come to the forefront of machine learning research. One approach, which relies on exploiting the geometry of the...

In this talk I shall sketch some results Oliver Riordan of Oxford and I have obtained on critical probabilities in percolation. Recently, Scullard and Ziff noticed that a broad class of planar percolation models are self-dual under a simple condition...

An alternating permutation w=a1⋯an of 1,2,…,n is a permutation such that ai>ai+1 if and only if i is odd. If En (called an Euler number) denotes the number of alternating permutations of 1,2,…,n, then ∑n≥0Enxnn!=secx+tanx. We will discuss such topics...