North British Probability Seminar – Events
Seminars and Events for 25/26: (NBPS runs on Tuesday afternoons from 2.05 pm to 3 pm in the academic year 25/26)
Tuesday April 28, 2026
Will Hide (University of Oxford)
Time: 2.05 – 3.00 pm
Location: JCMB 5323
Title: Spectral gaps of random hyperbolic surfaces
Abstract:
Based on joint work with Davide Macera and Joe Thomas. The first non-zero eigenvalue, or spectral gap, of the Laplacian on a closed hyperbolic surface encodes important geometric and dynamical information about the surface. We study the size of the spectral gap for random large genus hyperbolic surfaces sampled according to the Weil-Petersson probability measure. We show that there is a c>0 such that a random surface of genus g has spectral gap at least 1/4-O(g^-c) with high probability. Our approach adapts the polynomial method for the strong convergence of random matrices, introduced by Chen, Garza-Vargas, Tropp and van Handel, and its generalization to the strong convergence of premutation representations of surface groups by Magee, Puder and van Handel, to the Laplacian on Weil-Petersson random hyperbolic surfaces.
Tuesday May 5, 2026
Benoit Dagallier (Universite Paris Dauphine-PSL)
Time: 2.05 – 3.00 pm
Location: JCMB 6206 (Note the room is different from the usual room)
Title: TBA
Abstract:
TBA
Tuesday May 12, 2026
Andrew Campbell (IST Austria)
Time: 2.05 – 3.00 pm
Location: JCMB 5323
Title: TBA
Abstract:
TBA
Tuesday May 26, 2026
Liam Solus (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
Time: 2.05 – 3.00 pm
Location: JCMB 5323
Title:TBA
Abstract:
TBA