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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.