Department of Mathematics: The Alan Mekler Department Colloquium "Combinatorics with Gaussian Integrals"
14:30 - 15:30
Rm10900
Abstract
Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Physics and Deputy Director of PIMS
Abstract: This will be an exposition of identities that link Gaussian integration with combinatorial problems, in particular self-avoiding walks, tree-like molecules and the matrix tree theorem.
About the Speaker
David Brydges received his PhD in 1976 at the University of Michigan under the direction of Paul Federbush. He was in the faculty of the departments of mathematics and of physics at the University of Virginia until 2001, when he was appointed as a Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia. He is known to mathematical physics and probability through his work on self-avoiding walk, branched polymers, Coulomb systems and the renormalisation group, and has lectured on these subjects in the Troisieme Cycle at Lausanne, in the NachDiplom program at ETH, Switzerland, and at the Park City Graduate Summer School. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research fellow in 1982-1984 and president of the International Association of Mathematical Physics from 2003-2005.
