Speaker: 

Shiwen Zhang

Institution: 

Michigan State

Time: 

Friday, January 12, 2018 - 2:00pm

Location: 

Rh 340N

The Favard length of a set E has a probabilistic interpretation: up to a constant factor, it is the probability that the Buffon's needle, a long line segment dropped at random, hits E. In this talk, we study the Favard length of some random Cantor sets of dimension 1. Replace the unit disc by 4 disjoint sub-discs of radius 1/4 inside. By repeating this operation in a self-similar manner and adding a random rotation in each step, we can generate a random Cantor set D. Let D_n be the n-th generation in the construction, which is comparable to the 4^{-n}-neighborhood of D. We are interested in the decay rate of the Favard length of these sets D_n as n tends to infinity, which is the likelihood (up to a constant) that the Buffon's needle will fall into the 4^{-n}-neighborhood of D. It is well known that the lower bound for such 1-dimensional set is constant multiple of 1/n. We show that the upper bound of the Favard length of D_n is also constant multiple of 1/n in the average sense.