Probability Seminar Department of Statistics and Department of Mathematics Joint with Department of Statistics, Research Colloquia Monday, March 31, 2003 3:30 PM in REC 227 Professor Jan Wehr The University of Arizona will speak on Central Limit Theorems: From Pascal's Gambling Escapades to Conductivity of Disordered Systems Abstract Classical probability theory studies asymptotic behavior of suitably scaled arithmetic means of independent random variables. Several problems in mathematical physics lead to analogous questions in which the arithmetic means are replaced by iterations of nonlinear functions which have some averaging properties. An analog of the law of large numbers holds in a large class of such models but, unlike in the classical case, the fluctuations may not be asymptotically Gaussian. We will review some recent work on the subject, including a computer assisted proof of anomalous conductance fluctuations in a hierarchical random resistor network.

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