Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We will discuss a general theory of intertwined diffusion processes of any dimension. Intertwined processes arise in many different contexts in probability theory, most notably in the study of random matrices, random polymers and path decompositions of Brownian motion. Recently, they turned out to be also closely related to hyperbolic partial differential equations, symmetric polynomials and the corresponding random growth models. The talk will be devoted to these recent developments which also shed new light on some beautiful old examples of intertwinings. Based on joint works with Vadim Gorin and Soumik Pal.

The Anderson model on a discrete graph is given by the graph Laplacian perturbed by a random potential. I study spectral properties of this random Schroedinger operator on a random regular graph of fixed degree in the limit where the number of vertices tends to infinity.The choice of model is motivated by its relation to two important and well-studied models of random operators: On the one hand there are similarities to random matrices, for instance to Wigner matrices, whose spectra are known to obey universal laws. On the other hand a random Schroedinger operator on a random regular graph is expected to approximate the Anderson model on the homogeneous tree, a model where both localization (characterized by pure point spectrum) and delocalization (characterized by absolutely continuous spectrum) was established.I will show that the Anderson model on a random regular graph also exhibits distinct spectral regimes of localization and of delocalization. One regime is characterized by exponential decay of eigenvectors. In this regime I analyze the local eigenvalue statistics and prove that the point process generated by the eigenvalues of the random operator converges in distribution to a Poisson process.In contrast to that I will also show that the model exhibits a spectral regime of delocalization where eigenvectors are not exponentially localized.

Discrepancy theory, also referred to as the theory of irregularities of distribution, has been developed into a diverse and fascinating field, with numerous closely related areas, including, numerical integration, Ramsey theory, graph theory, geometry, and theoretical computer science, to name a few. Informally, given a set system S defined over an n-item set X, the combinatorial discrepancy is the minimum, over all two-colorings of X, of the largest deviation from an even split, over all sets in S. Since the celebrated ``six standard deviations suffice'' paper of Spencer in 1985, several long standing open problems in the theory of combinatorial discrepancy have been resolved, including tight discrepancy bounds for halfspaces in d-dimensions [Matousek 1995] and arithmetic progressions [Matousek and Spencer 1996]. In this talk, I will present new discrepancy bounds for set systems of bounded ``primal shatter dimension'', with the property that these bounds are sensitive to the actual set sizes. These bounds are nearly-optimal. Such set systems are abstract, but they can be realized by simply-shaped regions, as halfspaces, balls, and octants in d-dimensions, to name a few. Our analysis exploits the so-called "entropy method" and the technique of "partial coloring", combined with the existence of small "packings".

Kronecker coefficients lie at the intersection of representation theory, algebraic combinatorics and, most recently, complexity theory. They count the multiplicities of irreducible representations in the tensor product of two other irreducible representations of the symmetric group. While their study was initiated almost 75 years, remarkably little is known about them. One of the major problems of algebraic combinatorics is to find an explicit positive combinatorial formula for these coefficients. Recently, this problem found a new meaning in the field of Geometric Complexity Theory, initiated by Mulmuley and Sohoni, where certain conjectures on the complexity of computing and deciding positivity of Kronecker coefficients are part of a program to prove the "P vs NP" problem. In this talk we will give an overview of this topic and we will describe several problems with some results on different aspects of the Kronecker coefficients. We will explore Saxl conjecture stating that the tensor square of certain irreducible representation of S_n contains every irreducible representation, and present a criterion for determining when a Kronecker coefficient is nonzero. In a more combinatorial direction, we will show how to prove certain unimodality results using Kronecker coefficients, including the classical Sylvester's theorem on the unimodality of q-binomial coefficients (as polynomials in q). We will also present some results on complexity in light of Mulmuley's conjectures. The presented results are based on joint work with Igor Pak and Ernesto Vallejo.