Bela Bollobas : Critical Probabilities

Posted by , part of the Departmental Colloquium.

At

April 7, 2006, 3:15 p.m.

In

SEO 636

Abstract

Percolation theory was founded by Broadbent and Hammersley in 1957, in order to model the flow of fluid in a porous medium with randomly blocked channels. By now, the field has blossomed into a huge area, with thousands of papers, many books, and exciting connections to several branches of mathematics and physics. In the talk I shall introduce and study one of the basic parameters of percolation theory, the critical probability. I shall sketch greatly simplified proofs of two fundamental and classical theorems, and I shall present some recent results obtained jointly with Oliver Riordan. The talk should be understandable to people with a minimal background in probability theory.