The Thirty-second Midwest Probability Colloquium will be held at Northwestern University October 14-16, 2010. The theme of this year's meeting is Random Matrices, for which the centerpiece is the two lectures by Kurt Johansson. In addition to supporting the speakers, we will fund the travel and lodging expenses for graduate students, younger researchers and members of unrepresented minority groups.
The Thirty-Second Midwest Probability Colloquium was held at Northwestern University on October 14-16, 2010 with the financial support of NSF and Northwestern. A totalof 75 participants were registered for the three-day program. In formulating our policies, an effort is made to emphasize the following points: 1) We make every effort to put forth a broad theme in the choice of speakers. Classically, probability theory has been instrumental in the development of statistical theory and more recently toward operations research, mathematical finance theory and computer science---to name a few. We feel that the topics presented will illustrate this diversity. 2) We make every effort to involve graduate students women and recent postdocs, meaning six years past the PhD. This is achieved by allotting a large share of the grant to the housing and subsistence of these individuals. 3) We make every effort to keep the number of talks to a minimum, in order to permit interaction between colleagues and cohorts at other universities. With seven talks in three days there is ample time to have such discussions. Oftentimes such encounters lead to new research, which heartens the organizers. 4) We make every effort to involve as many people as possible, in the choice of speakers. This is achieved by selection of a rotating program committee which begins its deliberations in early December(if not sooner) and concludes in early April(if not sooner). At that time the Program Committee is discharged and the Local Organizers take over. In the course of 32 years, we have had 96 differ individuals involved in planing the sessions. In 2010 our Principal Speaker was Kurt Johannsen from Stockholm, who gave two one-hour talks on non-colliding Brownian motion and random matrix theory.This subject has become increasingly important in studying large systems of particles in the kinetic theory of gases. This was accompanied by an hour talk by Benedek Valko from Madison Wisconsin, speaking on the same theory. OurThursday program was organized by Timo Seppalinen, who spoke on random walks in random environments. END
