Seminar at SMU Delhi

September 30, 2015 (Wednesday) , 3:30 PM at Webinar

This talk is meant for a general audience.

Speaker: Manjunath Krishnapur, Indian Institute of Science
Title: Collisions between random walks
Abstract of Talk
Polya initiated the study of random walks by asking the question: Will a random walk on the integer lattice return to the starting point with probability one? It was equivalent to his original question, which was whether two independent random walks meet with probability one. In a paper with Yuval Peres (in 2004), we found that the answer could be surprising if the graph is not regular. In particular there are graphs on which a single random walk visits every vertex with probability one, but two random walkers have a positive probability to never meet. We explain the result and the ideas in the proof.