Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/09/2025
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Speaker: Dr. Noah Forman

Location: Hamilton Hall, Room 102

Title: Urn schemes, Chinese restaurants, and a walk on tree–space

Abstract: Imagine a random tree that changes randomly over time. At each time step, one leaf gets moved to a different part of the tree. In 1999, David Aldous conjectured that a process of this form would have a continuum analogue – a continuously, randomly changing “continuum tree.” Motivated by Aldous’s conjecture, this talk will introduce classical examples of discrete stochastic processes – Polya’s Urn, the Chinese Restaurant Process, and Aldous’s Markov chain on trees – which all share the property of exchangeability, and which relate to each other in surprising ways.