During the Fall semester of the 2023–24 academic year, the CMSA hosted the Probability Seminar organized by Benjamin McKenna, Changji Xu, and Kevin Yang.

This seminar will move to the Harvard Mathematics Department in Spring 2024. The schedule will be updated at www.math.harvard.edu  as talks are confirmed.

To join the Probability Seminar Listserv, please visit this LINK.

How do the eigenvalues of a large non-Hermitian random matrix behave?

Harvard Science Center 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA

Probability Seminar Speaker: Giorgio Cipolloni (Princeton) Title: How do the eigenvalues of a large non-Hermitian random matrix behave? Abstract: We prove that the fluctuations of the eigenvalues converge to the Gaussian Free Field (GFF) on the unit disk. These fluctuations appear on a non-natural scale, due to strong correlations between the eigenvalues. Then, motivated by the […]

Light cones for open quantum systems

Science Center 232 Harvard Science Center, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138

Probability Seminar Speaker: Marius Lemm, University of Tuebingen Title: Light cones for open quantum systems Abstract: We consider non-relativistic Markovian open quantum dynamics in continuous space. We show that, up to small probability tails, the supports of quantum states propagate with finite speed in any finite-energy subspace. More precisely, if the initial quantum state is localized […]

Correlation decay for finite lattice gauge theories

Science Center 232 Harvard Science Center, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138

Probability Seminar Speaker: Arka Adhikari (Stanford) Title: Correlation decay for finite lattice gauge theories Abstract: In the setting of lattice gauge theories with finite (possibly non-Abelian) gauge groups at weak coupling, we prove exponential decay of correlations for a wide class of gauge invariant functions, which in particular includes arbitrary functions of Wilson loop observables. […]

Large deviations for the 3D dimer model

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

Probability Seminar Speaker: Catherine Wolfram (MIT) Title: Large deviations for the 3D dimer model Abstract: A dimer tiling of Z^d is a collection of edges such that every vertex is covered exactly once. In 2000, Cohn, Kenyon, and Propp showed that 2D dimer tilings satisfy a large deviations principle. In joint work with Nishant Chandgotia […]

Geometry of the doubly periodic Aztec dimer model

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

Probability Seminar Speaker: Tomas Berggren (MIT) Title: Geometry of the doubly periodic Aztec dimer model Abstract: Random dimer models (or equivalently tiling models) have been a subject of extensive research in mathematics and physics for several decades. In this talk, we will discuss the doubly periodic Aztec diamond dimer model of growing size, with arbitrary […]

Tail estimates for stationary KPZ models

Virtual

Probability Seminar Speaker: Benjamin Landon (University of Toronto) Title: Tail estimates for stationary KPZ models Abstract: The limiting distributions of the KPZ universality class exhibit tail exponents of 3/2 and 3. In this talk we will review recent work studying the upper tail exponent 3/2 in the moderate deviations regime of several KPZ models at […]

Universality of max-margin classifiers

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

Probability Seminar Speaker: Youngtak Sohn (MIT) Title: Universality of max-margin classifiers Abstract: Many modern learning methods, such as deep neural networks, are so complex that they perfectly fit the training data. Despite this, they generalize well to the unseen data. Motivated by this phenomenon, we consider high-dimensional binary classification with linearly separable data. First, we […]

Solving spin systems, the Babylonian way

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

Probability Seminar Speaker: Nicola Kistler (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) Title: Solving spin systems, the Babylonian way Abstract: The replica method, together with Parisi’s symmetry breaking mechanism, is an extremely powerful tool to compute the limiting free energy of virtually any mean field disordered system. Unfortunately, the tool is dramatically flawed from a mathematical point […]

Fitting ellipsoids to random points

Virtual

Probability Seminar Speaker: Antoine Maillard (ETH Zürich) Title: Fitting ellipsoids to random points Abstract: We consider the problem of exactly fitting an ellipsoid (centered at 0) to n standard Gaussian random vectors in dimension d, for very large n and d. This problem has connections to questions in statistical learning and theoretical computer science, and is […]

Thresholds

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

Probability Seminar Speaker: Jinyoung Park (NYU) Title: Thresholds Abstract: For a finite set X, a family F of subsets of X is said to be increasing if any set A that contains B in F is also in F. The p-biased product measure of F increases as p increases from 0 to 1, and often […]

A random matrix model towards the quantum chaos transition conjecture

Probability Seminar Speaker: Jun Yin (UCLA) Title: A random matrix model towards the quantum chaos transition conjecture Abstract: The Quantum Chaos Conjecture has long fascinated researchers, postulating a critical spectrum phase transition that separates integrable systems from chaotic systems in quantum mechanics. In the realm of integrable systems, eigenvectors remain localized, and local eigenvalue statistics […]

A Gaussian convexity for logarithmic moment generating function

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

Probability Seminar Speaker: Wei-Kuo Chen (University of Minnesota) Title: A Gaussian convexity for logarithmic moment generating function Abstract: Convex functions of Gaussian vectors are prominent objectives in many fields of mathematical studies. In this talk, I will establish a new convexity for the logarithmic moment generating function for this object and draw two consequences. The first leads to […]