Random Words, Increasing Subsequences and Random Matrices

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 29, 2008 - 12:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Christian Houdré – School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
Organizer
Ian Palmer
This talk is not an appetizer to pizza, but rather an appetizer to the main course: Hua Xu's and Trevis Litherland's thesis defenses which will respectively take place on Thursday the 30th of October and November the 6th, in Skiles 269, at 3pm. I will present the history and origins of the problems they have been tackling ("Ulam's problems"). Various interactions with other fields such as Analysis, Algebra (Young Tableaux) or Bioinformatics (Sequence Comparison) will be touched upon. Then, some elementary but rather useful probabilistic techniques will also be introduced and shown how to be applied.