Dear colleagues, We are delighted to announce that the One World Probability Seminar is returning for the Spring 2025 semester with a refreshed schedule! The seminar will be held every other Wednesday at 14:00 UTC. The season will kick off on Wednesday, March 12 at 14:00 UTC via Zoom (linkhttps://polimi-it.zoom.us/j/92945513591?pwd=zjtRwpHoO9kRyQuPPj4o186jXrvg1v.1). We are thrilled to welcome our first two speakers: Shankar Bhamidi (University of North Carolina) and David J. Aldous (UC Berkeley)
Please find titles and abstracts of their talks below and on our websitehttps://www.owprobability.org/about, which also contains future speakers for the semester. Originally launched during the early days of the pandemic to keep the probability community connected, our seminar has since hosted over 100 research talks from around the globe. It remains open to anyone eager to learn about the latest developments in probability theory. We encourage you to share this announcement as we embark on this new chapter. If you want updates on future OWP seminars, consider joining our mailing list: herehttps://www.owprobability.org/mailing-list the instructions. We look forward to seeing many of you online! Best wishes, Luisa Andreis and Roger Van Peski
Aldous’s fringe convergence of random trees and its applications Shankar Bhamidi (UNC Chapel Hill) Local weak convergence starting with the work of Aldous and Benjamini and Schramm has turned out to be one of the standard work horses in modern probabilistic combinatorics, to understand asymptotics of large discrete random structures and dynamics of processes such as random walks on such processes. The goal of this talk is to describe the impact of one of the less well known “OG” (original great) papers in this area: Aldous’s work on fringe convergence of random trees developed in a paper in the mid 90s. This technique, coupled with stochastic approximation techniques allows one to relatively easily prove local weak convergence of a number of modern random tree models proposed by domain scientists, including network evolution with limited choice, network dynamics where new individuals have access to only a partial temporal snapshot of the network and network evolution models where individuals have different attributes.
Obscure results and open problems: some of my favorites David J. Aldous (UC Berkeley) These are some problems that I would like some smart young person to work on! (1) What probability distributions on $[0,\infty)$ arise as the distance between two i.i.d. points in some complete separable metric space? (2) Probability distributions on routed planar networks. (3) Combinatorics of fringe trees in a phylogenetic model. (4) Nearest neighbor of nearest neighbor, on the complete network -- Are you smarter than an AI? (5) Find a qualitatively realistic model for a generic subway network. (6) Percolation of empires.