Wednesday 22 October 2025 at 4:45 pm, as part of the Insalate di Matematica seminar cycle, Giacomo Passuello (University of Padua) will give the following talk
Title: Mixing times of random walks on directed random graphs
Abstract: How long does it take to shuffle a deck of 52 cards? This simple question has generated, in the last 40 years, an active research area in the field of discrete probability related to mixing times and the cutoff phenomenon. A cutoff is a dynamical phase transition for a random process, which appears as the size of the system becomes large: it occurs when the distance to equilibrium of the process abruptly drops from its maximum value to zero at a critical time scale. In this talk I will introduce the concept of mixing time of a Markov chain and present some results for the simple random walk on directed random graphs. Despite the randomness of the environment and the lack of reversibility, the cutoff can occur at a deterministic time.
Keywords: Markov chains, mixing times, cutoff, random graphs
Information to attend
The seminar will be held in Room U9-09 (U9 Building - Viale dell'Innovazione 10, Milan) and will also be available online by this link (password: insalate, 46725283 from phones).
For more information, visit the website