Coastlines, the edge of burned paper, the boundary of coffee spots, the game of Tetris: random interfaces surround us. Still, the mathematical theory of the most important case, the "KPZ universality class", has only been cracked very recently.
This class is related to traffic models, longest increasing subsequences of random permutations, the RSK correspondence of combinatorics, last passage percolation, integrable systems and the stochastic heat equation. A new random metric in the plane, the "directed landscape" captures the essence of these problems.
Penn Mathematics Colloquium
Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - 3:30pm
Balint Virag
Univ. of Toronto