Robin PEMANTLE Cornell 2009 Summer School Page
Version of 17 July 2009
There will be five lectures on generating functions and one on
probabilistic number theory. The lectures on generating functions
will be accompanied by lecture notes. These will be revised during
or shortly after the two-week summer school, but for now I am posting
a preliminary version, no doubt riddled with errors, in order to
accomodate those anyone wanting access ahead of time. You can tell
they have been revised when the Version date is no longer June.
These are lecture notes, not lecture slides. There will be no lecture
slides. The lectures themselves, except for Lecture 4 which is largely
pictorial, will be chalk talks, presenting the main ideas and
avoiding lengthy derivations. The main purpose of the notes
is to give some of the details omitted in the talks, allowing
the audience to go over these later, or to browse them in real time
during the lecture. I say "some of the details" because many aspects
of the background appear in the lecture notes in a form condensed from
other sources. I have tried to give precise citations to sources where
a full treatment is given.
Links are given below to the lecture notes, as well as to
readings that provide more detailed background for each lecture.