2025 Public Lecture in Mathematics

University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

Monday, March 31, 2025 at 5:30pm

Physical Sciences Building, Room 217

Questions?  Email erman@hawaii.edu

Abstract:

Between 1905 and 1910 the idea of the random walk, now a major topic in applied math, was invented simultaneously and independently by multiple people in multiple countries for completely different purposes, from mosquito control to physics to finance to winning a theological argument (really!) I’ll tell some part of this story and also gesture at ways that random walks (or Markov processes, named after the theological arguer) underlie current approaches artificial intelligence, and what this tells us about the capabilities of those systems now and in the future.