Spectral methods for classical and quantum walks

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, March 8, 2012 - 11:05am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
F. Alberto Grünbaum – University of California, Berkeley
Organizer
Plamen Iliev
I will review the well known method (pushed mainly by Karlin and McGregor) to study birth-and-death processes with the help of orthogonal polynomials. I will then look at several extensions of this idea, including ¨poker dice¨ (polynomials in several variables) and quantum walks (polynomials in the unit circle).