Speaker: 

Professor Ben Morris

Institution: 

UC Davis

Time: 

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - 11:00am

Location: 

RH 306

A random walk is called recurrent if it is sure to return to its starting point and transient otherwise. A famous result of Polya is that simple symmetric random walk on the integer lattice is recurrent in dimensions 1 and 2, and transient in higher dimensions. We study random walks that are small perturbations of simple random walk. Our main result is that if the dimension is high enough then these random walks are transient.