Seminar

The participants at the Random Spatial Processes program come from many different areas: combinatorics, probability, complex analysis, theoretical physics, computer science, representation theory. Although these give different perspectives, they all arise in the analysis of critical processes in statistical physics. I will discuss a simple (to state, not necessarily to analyze!) model, the self-avoiding walk and show how multiple perspectives are useful in its study. A (planar) self-avoiding walk is a lattice random walk path in the plane with no self-intersections. It can be viewed as a simple model for polymers.

I will show how we now in one sense understand this model very well, and in another sense we still know very little!