PHD CONFIRMATION SEMINAR Speaker: John Harrison, CARMA, The University of Newcastle Title: Random Walks on Groups Location: Room GP216, General Purpose Building (Callaghan Campus) The University of Newcastle Dates: 11:30 am, Tue, 24th Feb 2015 - 12:00 pm, Tue, 24th Feb 2015 Abstract: Random walks have been used to model stochastic processes in many scientific fields. I will introduce invariant random walks on groups, where the transition probabilities are given by a probability measure. The Poisson boundary will also be discussed. It is a space associated with every group random walk that encapsulates the behaviour of the walks at infinity and gives a description of certain harmonic functions on the group in terms of the essentially bounded functions on the boundary. I will conclude with a discussion of project aims, namely to compute the boundary for certain random walks in new cases and to investigate the order structure of certain ideals in $L^1(G)$ defined for each invariant random walk. Supervisors: Prof. George Willis, Dr Jeff Hogan. [Permanent link]