US Travel Support for IHP Trimester in Probability

University Of Alabama At Birmingham, Birmingham AL

Investigators

Abstract

This travel grant provides support for US researchers participating in the Institute Henri Poincaré Trimester in Probability titled "Disordered Systems, Random Spatial Processes, and Some Applications." The trimester comprises four conferences that will take place between January and April 2015. Hard sciences such as mathematics and physics thrive on unsolved old and new problems. They have recently been called to focus on matters traditionally away from their realm, for instance on questions arising from socio-economic investigations. This situation presents a new opportunity for growth of the fields. This set of meetings provides a venue for a range of scientific communities to discuss these sometimes-controversial topics, toward development of a common and well-grounded scientific understanding. The two research areas of disordered systems and random spatial processes have developed in recent years the methodological and conceptual skills to approach these new applications. The trimester concerns studies of random spatial processes, disordered systems, and applications to socio-economic sciences. Spatial probability is concerned with the investigation of large-scale random structures extended in space-time. Disordered systems are a natural setting to describe phenomena with multiple equilibrium states, a situation that now appears to be the norm rather than an exception. Regarding applications to socio-economic systems, the main theme will be strongly interacting agent based models, which are extensions of the McFadden Discrete Choice theory (Nobel Prize in Economy, 2000). Specific models to be discussed include: Polymer models and self-interacting walks; random walks in a (dynamically evolving) random environment; two-dimensional models scaling to stochastic Loewner evolution; random graphs, from the simple Poissonian degree distribution to the scale-free; the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model; the Edwards-Anderson model; branching/coagulation processes; directed polymers in random environment in 1+1 dimensions; and the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class. The program website is http://www.ihp.fr/en/CEB/T1-2015