PIMS/UBC Distinguished Colloquium: Béla Bollobás (Cambridge & Memphis)

  • Date: 02/15/2013
Lecturer(s):

Béla Bollobás, Cambridge & Memphis

 

Béla Bollobás has proved numerous important results in mathematical areas including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1970 and in 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his major contributions to mathematics.

Location: 

University of British Columbia

Topic: 

Recent Results on Bootstrap Percolation.

Description: 

Bootstrap percolation, one of the simplest cellular automata, can be viewed as an oversimplified model of the spread of an infection on a graph. In the past three decades, much work has been done on bootstrap percolation on finite grids of a given dimension in which the initially infected set A is obtained by selecting its vertices at random, with the same probability p, independently of all other choices. The focus has been on the critical probability, the value of p at which the probability of percolation (eventual full infection) is 1/2.
The first half of my talk will be a review of some of the fundamental results concerning critical probabilities proved by Aizenman, Lebowitz, Schonman, Cerf, Cirillo, Manzo, Holroyd and others, and by Balogh, Morris, Duminil-Copin and myself. The second half will about about the very recent results I have obtained with Holmgren, Smith, Uzzell and Balister on the time a random initial set takes to percolate.

Schedule: 

Lecture begins at 3:00 pm in MATX 1100, preceded by a reception in MATH 125 at 2:30 pm

Other Information: