Methods of enumeration of spanning trees in a finite graph and relations to
various areas of mathematics and physics have been investigated for more
than 150 years. We will review the history and applications. Then we will
give new formulas for the asymptotics of the number of spanning trees of a
graph. A special case answers a question of McKay (1983) for regular
graphs. The general answer involves a quantity for infinite graphs that we
call ``tree entropy", which we show is a logarithm of a normalized
[Fuglede-Kadison] determinant of the graph Laplacian for infinite graphs.
Proofs involve new traces and the theory of random walks.
Abstract : We consider a simple random walk on Z
, d > 3. We also consider
a collection of i.i.d. positive and bounded random variables ( V? (x) )x?Z d , which will
serve as a random potential. We study the annealed and quenched cost to perform
long crossings in the random potential ? + ? V? (x), where ? is positive constant
and ? > 0 small enough . These costs are measured by the Lyapounov norms We
prove the equality of the annealed and the quenched norm. We will also discuss the
relation between the Lyapounov norms and the path behavior of the random walk
in the random potential.
A number of recent experiments have shown that several organisms
that reproduce by fissioning (e.g. E. coli bacteria)
don't share the cellular damage they have
accumulated during their lifetime equally among their offspring. Using
a stochastic PDE model, David Steinsaltz and I have shown that under quite
general conditions the optimal asymptotic growth rate for a population
of fissioning organisms is obtained when there is a non-zero but moderate
amount of preferential segregation of damage -- too much or too little
asymmetry is counter-productive. The proof uses some new results of ours
on quasi-stationary distributions of one-dimensional diffusions and
some Sturm-Liouville theory. The talk is intended for a probability
audience and I won't assume any knowledge of biology.
A number of recent experiments have shown that several organisms
that reproduce by fissioning (e.g. E. coli bacteria)
don't share the cellular damage they have
accumulated during their lifetime equally among their offspring. Using
a stochastic PDE model, David Steinsaltz and I have shown that under quite
general conditions the optimal asymptotic growth rate for a population
of fissioning organisms is obtained when there is a non-zero but moderate
amount of preferential segregation of damage -- too much or too little
asymmetry is counter-productive. The proof uses some new results of ours
on quasi-stationary distributions of one-dimensional diffusions and
some Sturm-Liouville theory. The talk is intended for a probability
audience and I won't assume any knowledge of biology.
Classical multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a method for visualizing high-dimensional point clouds by mapping to low-dimensional Euclidean space. This mapping is defined in terms of eigenfunctions of a matrix of interpoint proximities. I'll discuss MDS applied to a specific dataset: the 2005 United States House of Representatives roll call votes. In this case, MDS outputs 'horseshoes' that are characteristic of dimensionality reduction techniques. I'll show that in general, a latent ordering of the data gives rise to these patterns when one only has local information. That is, when only the interpoint distances for nearby points are known accurately. Our results provide insight into manifold learning in the special case where the manifold is a curve. This work is joint with Persi Diaconis and Susan Holmes.
Abstract: for (transient) one dimensional random walk in random environment, conditions are known that ensure an annealed CLT. One then also have a quenched CLT, with a different (environment dependent) centering.
In higher dimensions, annealed CLT's have been derived in the ballistic case by Sznitman. We prove that in dimension 4 or more, annealed CLT's together with a mild integrability condition imply a quenched CLT. The proof is based on controlling the intersections of two RWRE paths in the same environment.
We will discuss a strong law of large numbers, an annealed CLT, and
the limit law of the ``environment viewed from the particle" for transient
random walks on a strip (product of Z with a finite set). The model was
introduced by Bolthausen and Goldsheid and includes in particular RWRE
with bounded jumps on the line as well as some one-dimensional RWRE with a
memory.
We consider a nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLS) with random
coefficients, in a regime of separation of scales corresponding to
diffusion approximation. The primary goal is to propose and
study an efficient numerical scheme in this framework. We use a
pseudo-spectral splitting scheme and we establish the order of the
global error. In particular we show that we can take an integration step
larger than the smallest scale of the problem, here the correlation
length of the random medium. We study
the asymptotic behavior of the numerical solution in the diffusion
approximation regime.