University of Washington

The positive Grassmannian is a remarkable subset of the real Grassmannian which has recently arisen in diverse contexts such as integrable systems, scattering amplitudes, and free probability. I will provide an elementary introduction to the positive...

Ran­dom matri­ces now play a role in many areas of the­o­ret­i­cal, applied, and com­pu­ta­tional math­e­mat­ics. There­fore, it is desir­able to have tools for study­ing ran­dom matri­ces that are flex­i­ble, easy to use, and pow­er­ful. Over the...

The Eulerian polynomials, which were introduced by Euler over 200 years ago, are pervasive throughout discrete mathematics and arise in a variety of surprising ways. Over the years generalizations and q-analogs possessing fundamental properties of...

The online advertising industry is a rich environment for novel mathematical problems at the intersection of technology and theory. After introducing myself, AppNexus, and how I came to have my role there after having studied differential geometry...

Flow and cut prob­lems on graphs are among the most fun­da­men­tal and exten­sively stud­ied prob­lems in Oper­a­tions Research and Opti­miza­tion, play­ing a foun­da­tional role in both the the­ory and prac­tice of algo­rithm design. While the clas...

The Birnbaum Lecture in Probability will be delivered by Balint Virag (University of Toronto) in 2015.Northwest Probability Seminars are mini-conferences held at the University of Washington and/or Microsoft Research and organized in collaboration...

In many appli­ca­tions one wishes to min­i­mize an objec­tive func­tion that is not con­vex and is not dif­fer­en­tiable at its min­i­miz­ers. We dis­cuss two algo­rithms for min­i­miza­tion of non­smooth, non­con­vex func­tions. Gra­di­ent Sam­pling...

In a simple symmetric random walk on Z a particle jumps left or right with 50% chance independently at each time and space location. What if the jump probabilities are taken to be random themselves (e.g. uniformly distributed between 0% and 100%)? In...

Nonabelian multiplicative integration on curves is a classical theory, going back to Volterra in the 19th century. In differential geometry this operation can be interpreted as the holonomy of a connection along a curve. In probability theory this is...

The Pacific Northwest Geometry Seminar (PNGS) is a regional meeting for geometers of all kinds. It is held every fall and spring, and every other winter, rotating among the following participating institutions: Oregon State University Portland State...