Public Lecture Speaker: Dr. John McCarthy
Title: What are random commuting matrices, and what can one say about them?
Abstract: The topic of random matrices has been studied for over a century, but first came to prominence with the work of Wigner and Dyson in the 1950's and 1960's. They used large random Hermitian matrices to model complicated Hamiltonians, and the statistics of the eigenvalue distribution of the random matrices predicted energy levels that were confirmed experimentally. We will first talk about random matrices - what they are, and what some known results are. Then we will talk about random pairs of commuting matrices - how are they defined, and what can be said about them?
Brief introduction: Dr. McCarthy is the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis. He grew up in Ireland, and was an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and received the 2016 G. de B. Robinson award from the Canadian Mathematical Society. He is the founder of (and so far sole contributor to) the Journal of Xenomathematics.
Day & Time: Friday, April 5, 2024 at 3:00pm
Location: Odette 108
Counts toward seminar attendance for MSc and PhD students in Math & Stats.