The Department of Mathematics is hosting a series of colloquia, open for all to attend. On 21 November 2023, Marton Balazs from the University of Bristol will give a talk on 'Road layout in the KPZ class'. The talk will be held in person and streamed via Microsoft Teams. The location for the in-person event is Bush House SE 2.09, Strand Campus, King's College London.

A drinks reception in the Small Committee Room (K0.31) will take place after the talk.

Abstract from the speaker: In this talk I will be after a model for road layouts. Imagine a Poisson process on the plane for start points of cars. Each car picks an independent random direction and goes straight that way for some distance. I will start with showing that the origin (my house, that is) will see a lot of car traffic in an arbitrary small distance.

Which is not what we find in the real world out there, why? The answer is of course coalescence of paths in the random environment provided by hills and other geographic or societal obstacles. This points us towards first passage percolation (FPP), a model which I will introduce. Due to lack of results for FPP, instead we built our model in exponential last passage percolation (LPP), which I will also introduce. I will then explain how to construct our road layout model in LPP, and what phenomena we can prove about roads and cars in this model using results from the LPP literature.

About the speaker: Information of Marton Balazs can be viewed here.

Registration

This talk will take place in person at King's College London and will be streamed online via Microsoft Teams. Please click 'Register for this event' to sign up for either an In-Person Ticket or an Online Ticket. If you wish to attend the in-person event, you must select the correct ticket type.

Future colloquia

Please check our event series for details of upcoming speakers.