Random Structures and Limit Objects

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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.