Past Events

Highlights of the speaker's statistical research of the past 40 years will be presented. A common thread of his contributions to expert use, dependence modeling, and risk assessment is the development of methods for situations where direct...

In this talk I will present a model of how individuals’ and politicians’ incentives to use physical distancing change during an infectious disease outbreak. I show that there is a fundamental difference in the expected behaviour depending on the...

Work of Thurston and Perelman implies that every compact 3-manifold decomposes into pieces each of which supports one of eight possible geometric structures. Among these eight geometries, the hyperbolic geometry leads to the richest and least well...

We develop the theory of the additive dimension dim(A), i.e. the size of a maximal dissociated subset of a set A. It was shown that the additive dimension is closely connected with the growth of higher sumsets nA of our set A. We apply this approach...

In a celebrated paper Gromov computed the topological entropy of endomorphisms of the complex projective space. In a recent joint work with Junyi Xie and Tuyen Trung Truong we extended Gromov's arguments to the non-archimedean case. We shall present...

When we iterate functions over finite structures, there is an underlying natural functional graph. For a function $f$ over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$, this graph has $q$ nodes and a directed edge from vertex $a$ to vertex $b$ if and only if $f(a)...

The Zariski closure of the central path (which interior point algorithms track in convex optimization problems such as linear and semidefinite programs) is an algebraic curve, called the central curve. Its degree has been studied in relation to the...

The sign test (Arbuthnott, 1710) and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (Wilcoxon, 1945) are among the first examples of a nonparametric test. These procedures — based on signs, (absolute) ranks and signed-ranks — yield distribution-free tests for...

Consider a birth-death process started from one individual in which each individual gives birth at rate λ and dies at rate μ, so that the population size grows at rate r=λ−μ. Lambert (2018) and Harris, Johnston, and Roberts (2020) came up with...

Vertex operator algebras are the symmetry algebras of two dimensional conformal field theory. In a famous series of papers, Kazhdan and Lusztig proved an equivalence between particular semisimple categories of modules over affine Lie algebras and...