University of Washington

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...

Erdös Magic, aka The Probabilistic Method, is a powerful tool for proving the existence of a combinatorial object, such as a coloring. A probability space is created for which the probability of success is positive. Hence the desired object must...

There is a widely held belief in physics that a true astrophysical black hole, formed from the gravitational collapse of some stellar object, can be described by a certain exact solution to the Einstein equations discovered by Kerr in the 60s. This...

Abstract In this talk we will discuss issues related to the existence of a moduli space for varieties of general type. Recall that varieties of general type are the higher dimensional analog of Riemann surfaces of genus at least 2. We will explain...