A guided tour through random media

From 12 to16 December a workshop "Guided Tour: Random Media" was organised at Eurandom, on the occasion of the 60th birthday of Frank den Hollander, who was, among other things, a former director of Eurandom.

 

Goal

The goal of the workshop was to bring together leading researchers working on various aspects of research involving random media and have them report on recent advances in their fields. The audience had one additional feature in common; namely, they were all collaborators, former students or postdocs of Frank den Hollander, or their work has been heavily influenced by him. Den Hollander has been a central figure in research on random media over the last three decades and he managed to attract a lot of talented young people in it. As a result, the field is flourishing and many new research problems are being formulated and/or solved.

 

Programme

The conference was roughly arranged according to five different topics to which Den Hollander has made especially noteworthy contributions. About each of them a panoramic talk as well as some 60-mutes talks and 30-minutes talks was given.

 

The five main topics were the following:
1) Polymer models and self-interacting random walks

2) Random Walks in Random Environments
3) Dynamical Gibbs-nonGibbs transitions and large deviations

4) Metastability

5) The Parabolic Anderson Model

 

The panoramic talk was provided by Wolfgang Koenig, who recently finished a monograph on the parabolic Anderson model. The emphasis in the talk was on the time-dependent case and the major contributions of Den Hollander and co-workers on this problem.