Dear all,
Title: A drunkard's walk through a sub-Riemannian manifold
Speaker: Thomas Laetsch (UCONN)
Time: Friday, April 18, 2014 3:00 pm
MSB 109A
Abstract: A sub-Riemannian manifold M is a connected smooth manifold such
that the only smooth curves in M which are admissible are those whose tangent
vectors at any point are restricted to a subset of all possible tangent vectors.
Such spaces have several applications in physics and engineering, as well as in
the study of hypo-elliptic operators. In this talk, we will construct a family of
geometrically natural hypo-elliptic Laplacian operators and discuss the trouble
with defining one which is canonical. We will also construct a random walk on M
which converges weakly to a process whose infinitesimal generator is one of our
hypo-elliptic Laplacian operators. This is joint work with Masha Gordina.
Hope to see you,
Iddo.
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