SMS scnews item created by Leo Tzou at Thu 11 Jan 2018 1629
Type: Seminar
Modified: Wed 17 Jan 2018 2251
Distribution: World
Expiry: 13 Jul 2018
Calendar1: 2 Feb 2018 1430-1530
CalLoc1: Carslaw 524
CalTitle1: The asymmetric simple exclusion process
Auth: leo@120.154.15.208 (ltzo2369) in SMS-WASM

Joint Colloquium: Tracy -- Beyond the Bell-Shaped Curve: A New Universal Law

The bell-shaped curve (or more technically the normal law) arises in many
statistical applications ranging from coin tossing, scores on calculus exams,
heights of individuals, to name but three. Mathematically, the normal law
arises when independent outcomes of an experiment are averaged; for example,
the number of times heads appears in n tosses of a coin.
In the last two decades, new universal laws have been discovered when the
events are strongly dependent. The applications of these new universal laws
range from stochastic growth of an interface, analysis of large data sets, to
sorting algorithms in computer science.
This lecture will give a nontechnical introduction to these developments.