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Guest Speakers
- Raissa D'Souza is Assistant Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis. Her work integrates techniques from statistical physics, computer science and probability. The focus is on self-organization, ranging from self-organization of complex networks, to growth of crystal structures. Prior to joining UC Davis, Raissa received a PhD in physics from MIT, then was a postdoctoral fellow at both Bell Laboratories and at Microsoft Research, where she held joint appointments in math and theoretical physics. She has participated in many workshops on the interplay between probability, algorithms and statistical physics, including the Spring 2005 MSRI workshop by that name.
- Thomas Hayes is an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 2003. His dissertation was on fast MCMC-based sampling of graph colorings. He has participated in workshops on Markov chains at MSRI, AIM, Oberwolfach and Dagstuhl.
- Alistair Sinclair is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-chaired (with Yuval Peres) the Spring, 2005 MSRI research program Probability, Algorithms, and Statistical Physics. He has been an active researcher over many years in the mathematical foundations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms, and has also taught this material at both graduate and undergraduate level at Berkeley. In addition, he has presented expository lectures and short courses on aspects of this subject at various institutions, including MSRI, Berkeley; the Humboldt University, Berlin; the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste; and DIMACS, Princeton.
Organizers and course instructors
- David A. Levin is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oregon. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics in 1999 from the University of California, Berkeley and has taught courses in probability, statistics, and other areas of mathematics at the Universities of California, Connecticut, and Utah. Levin's activities in undergraduate education include coorganizing a Research Experience for Undergraduates at the University of Utah during Summer 2005, focused on the mathematics of games of chance.
- Yuval Peres is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-chaired the organizing committee for the Spring 2005 MSRI research program, Probability, Algorithms, and Statistical Physics (at which Levin and Wilmer were members). He has played a central role in several workshops on related material and conducted a graduate course on Markov chain convergence at the 2005 PIMS-MITACS Summer School in Probability (University of British Columbia, Vancouver). He co-organized the workshop Sharp Thresholds for Mixing Times, held in December 2004 at the American Institute of Mathematics (Palo Alto, California), focused on recent research in this area. In 1997, as part of the St. Flour School of Probability, Peres delivered a series of lectures on probability models involving trees. Peres has also led undergraduate seminars on several topics in probability. These include Gambling, Random Walks, and Electrical Networks and Paradoxes at Berkeley, and Markov Chains at Hebrew University.
- Elizabeth L. Wilmer, who is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Oberlin College, wrote a dissertation on Markov chain convergence under Persi Diaconis. She was a Project NExT Fellow in 1998–99 and has experience with many modes of undergraduate teaching. She has developed a liberal-arts mathematics course, Dots, Lines, and Coin Flips, which introduces many topics in graph theory and probability to non-majors. She uses interactive exercises and/or independent projects in all levels of her teaching at Oberlin and supports her courses there with multipurpose websites. She has also run a web-based discussion course for off-campus students during Oberlin's January term. At the Summer Program for Women in Mathematics (George Washington University, 1995), she helped run an entirely student-driven course in algebraic combinatorics.
