The Prague Summer School on Statistical Mechanics has traditionally been a meeting ground for students, postdocs and researchers working at the area between statistical mechanics and related mathematical disciplines. This year's school, planned for August 28-September 9, 2011, offers a list of very distinguished lectures and lecturers. The main program will consist of five minicourses with the following (confirmed) speakers and (tentative) titles: Michael Aizenman (Princeton) and Simone Warzel (Munich): Quantum spectra and dynamics under random potential Benjamin Schlein (Bonn): Spectral properties of Wigner matrices Herbert Spohn (Munich): Growth processes, directed polymers, and the 1D Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation Daniel Ueltschi (Warwick): Quantum Heisenberg models and their probabilistic representations Balint Toth (Budapest): Scaling limits of self-interacting walks and diffusions with long memory The topic of this year's Tutorial Program is probability theory and mass transportation. The leader of the Tutorial Program is: Theodor Sturm (Bonn University)
The support is requested for 10 US graduate students.
. The school took place in August 29-September 10, 2011 at the Charles University of Prague. Six principal lecturers led the classes at the school: Wolfgang Koening (WIAS Berlin), Benjamin Schlein (Bonn), Herbert Spohn (Munich), Daniel Ueltschi (Warwick) and Balint Toth (Bristol). The main subjects covered in the lectures were among the presently most active areas of research in probabiliy and mathematical physics: random matrices, models in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class, quantum spin systems, self-interacting diffusions and disordered quantum models. The program was sufficiently flexible to allow for significant one-on-one interaction between the lecturers and the participants. Many advanced graduate students and postdos in turn reported on their research in afternoon seminars. The school was very well attended; about 45 participants came from Europe, US, South America and Japan. About 10 US-based students and postdocs were able to attend thanks to the NSF award. Active personal interaction between US-based students/postdocs and experts from Europe is without doubt beneficial for exchange and crossfertilization of research ideas as well as future career development. Incidentaly, many of the participants have, in the meantime, transitioned to postdoctoral or regular academic positions.
