Random walk on the Heisenberg group

Random walk on the Heisenberg group

Probability Seminar
Mar 14, 2018, 03:10 PM - 04:00 PM | 1011 Evans Hall | Happening As Scheduled
Persi Diaconis, Stanford University
The Heisenberg group ( 3 by 3 upper-triangular matrices with entries in a ring) is a venerable mathematical object. Simple random walk picks one of the bottom two rows at random and adds or substracts it from the row above. I will use Fourier analysis to get sharp results about the long term behavior. For entries in integers mod n, the walk converges to uniform after order n squared steps