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Colloquium, Fall 2006

Day: Thursday, October 5 Time: 4:00pm Place: BH 227 Title: Branching Processes Speaker: Doug Galagate Abstract: A commonly held belief in England in the late 1800's was that the last names of distinguished families went extinct faster than those of ordinary families. The belief was challenged when mathematicians set out to model the situation with a new technique. This model and theory has been applied to many situations: the survival of mutant genes, neutron chain reactions, and electron multipliers. This talk will be about Branching Processes, a topic in probability theory that was developed to model reproduction and the behavior of populations. It will introduce some of the ideas leading up to Branching Processes such as random walks and Markov chains, and then will go into Branching Processes and some of its results. The audience can expect to learn some of the general ideas behind the theory of Branching Processes and learn some history. Refreshements: BH 300 at 3:30