OWPS's next session will be on Wednesday the 24th of May from 15:00 to 17:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). Our next speaker is: Justin Salez (Université Paris-Dauphine & PSL) Title, abstract and the zoom link are below the signature and can be found on the website https://www.owprobability.org/one-world-probability-seminar. If you are interested in the project, we kindly ask you to share this announcement within your community. With best wishes, Alberto Chiarini (Padua) and Adrián González Casanova (Berkeley and México) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Talk : Justin Salez (Université Paris-Dauphine & PSL) Title: A new approach to the cutoff phenomenon Abstract: The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity. Discovered forty years ago in the context of card shuffling, it has since then been observed in a variety of examples, from random walks on random graphs to high-temperature spin glasses. Nevertheless, a general theory is still missing, and identifying the precise mechanisms that underlie this phase transition remains one of the biggest challenges in the quantitative analysis of finite Markov chains. In the first part of the lecture, I will try to provide a self-contained introduction to this fascinating question. In the second part, I will describe a new approach based on entropy and curvature, which has recently led to a systematic proof of cutoff for a relatively broad class of chains. Join Zoom Meeting https://unipd.zoom.us/j/84651983262?pwd=N083WWs3RkIyZ0hHckFtbkEzY0xNZz09 Meeting ID: 846 5198 3262 Passcode: 009403 If you are having trouble with zoom, or if the capacity of the zoom room gets exceeded, you can also access to the Youtube live stream at the channel of the seminar: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiLiEQGTp6bZEhuHDM-WNWQ