Our colloquium takes place on the first Tuesday of each month from 15:30 to 16:30, usually in room A709.
A renowned expert (being an excellent speaker as well) visits us for an afternoon and gives a panorama of one of her research areas. The talk is meant to be accessible to all members of the lab, including PhD students in analysis, game theory, probability and statistics. Ideally, it should start gently with an historical background on the problem and an overview of the main questions and applications, keeping a non technical style during at least the first half of the talk. Of course it is also nice to have a part with more mathematical details: the most appreciated colloquia were those in which the speaker succeeded to develop a nice technical idea or an elegant argument that everyone should know.
Food and drinks are served after the event, usually in Espace 7!
Date: Tuesday, November 4th 2025 (15:30-16:30, room A709)
Title: Extreme diffusion
Abstract: Diffusion phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and have been studied theoretically for more than a century. Still, the influence of a random environment on diffusion is not very well understood. I will discuss about the simplest possible model of diffusion in random environment: a simple random walk. We will see that using methods coming from integrable systems, one can relate the extreme statistics of diffusive particles in random environment to an area of Statistical Physics called the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class.