Welcome to the Berkeley Student Probability Seminar, Fall 2026 edition! The broad theme of the seminar this semester is geometry and probability. For last semester's student seminar, see here. For past versions of the seminar, see here.
Location and time: Evans 939, Friday 1-2pm
Organizers:
MohammedSaid Alhalimi,
Victor Ginsburg,
Jake Hofgard,
Zoe McDonald,
Vilas Winstein,
Chris Yao
| Date | Speaker | Title (Click to expand) |
|---|---|---|
| Sept 4 | No speaker |
Organizational MeetingDeciding order of speakers and topics. |
| Sept 11 | Zoe McDonald |
An Introduction to Random SurfacesI will give a brief introduction to sphere-homeomorphic random surfaces through four different lenses: the Brownian sphere, the peanosphere, the pure Liouville quantum gravity sphere, and a conformal field theory. The talk will follow Scott Sheffield's survey paper, "What is a random surface?" |
| Sept 18 | Cecilia Chen |
The geometry of generating polynomials of nearly normal random variablesIn this talk we discuss the results of Michelen and Sahasrabudhe in their paper "Central limit theorems and the geometry of polynomials." In particular, we show that if a discrete random variable $X$ has a generating polynomial which is zero-free near 1, then $X$ is close to a Gaussian in distribution. Time permitting, we may also discuss extensions of this result presented in the same paper, using different zerofreeness properties. |
| Sept 25 | Chris Yao |
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| Oct 2 | Sho Kiami |
Localization Schemes I |
| Oct 9 | Jake Hofgard |
Localization Schemes II |
| Oct 16 | Yuntao Lu |
|
| Oct 23 | Lucas da Rocha Schwengber |
|
| Oct 30 | Ben Braiman |
|
| Nov 6 | Francesca Yu |
|
| Nov 13 | MohammedSaid Alhalimi |
|
| Nov 20 | Victor Ginsburg |
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| Nov 27 | No seminar | Thanksgiving break |
| Dec 4 | Vilas Winstein |
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