Random Structures and Limit Objects

将于2012年9月15日至16日在纽约大学Courant数学科学研究所举行的“随机结构和极限物体”会议将利用David Aldous 60岁生日的机会，将不同的知名专家和新研究人员聚集在一起，旨在讨论概率论和相关领域一些最紧迫的研究问题并取得进展。重点将放在受David Aldous影响的领域，如可交换性和图极限，马尔可夫链的混合时间及其与统计物理和计算机科学中的关键现象的深刻联系，极值理论和泊松近似，随机树和临界随机图，随机凝固和碎片模型，进化的系统发育和生物学模型以及局部弱收敛和组合优化的概念。会议将在两天内举行8场演讲，另外还有初级研究人员和研究生的简短演讲。像这样的专门数学会议很重要，因为它们给年轻的研究人员提供了一个交流思想、尝试新理论、与该领域一些杰出思想家互动的机会。本次会议将是一次公开会议，并将在数理统计研究所公报、美国数学学会公告、网络和一些电子邮件列表上刊登广告。还将维持一个会议网站。会议的幻灯片将在会议网站上提供。如果可能的话，我们还将收集会议中出现的一些核心问题和观点，并以调查的形式发表在开放获取的概率期刊（如probability Surveys）上。

The conference "Random Structures and Limit Objects", to be held on September 15-16, 2012 at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York University, will use the occasion of the 60th birthday of David Aldous to bring together a diverse group of eminent experts and new researchers, with the aim of discussing and making progress on some of the most pressing research questions in probability theory and related areas. Special emphasis will be laid on fields influenced by David Aldous's works, such as exchangeability and graph limits, mixing time of Markov chains and their deep connections with critical phenomena in statistical physics and computer science, extreme value theory and Poisson approximation, random trees and critical random graphs, stochastic coagulation and fragmentation models, phylogenetics and biological models of evolution and the notion of local weak convergence and combinatorial optimization. The conference will feature eight talks over a span of two days, with additional short talks by junior researchers and graduate students. Specialized mathematical meetings like this are important since they give people an opportunity to young researchers to exchange ideas and try out new theories and interact with some of the pre-eminent thinkers in the field. This conference will be an open meeting and will be advertised in the Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, on the Web, and through a number of electronic mailing lists. A conference website will also be maintained. The slides of the talks will be made available at the conference website. If possible, we will also collect some of the core questions and ideas that arise in the conference and publish this in survey form in an open access probability journal such as Probability Surveys.