In the framework of a PRIDE grant, an international workshop entitled “Geometry, Probability and its Synergies” was organized in Switzerland. This followed a long tradition of high-level mathematical conferences organized in the quaint the Diablerets village since the 1980s, the first of which was organized by Peter Buser who, as a wink to the past, was the final speaker of the workshop.
Viola Giovannini was enthralled by the event.
“During the week of 13-17 March, I had the pleasure of attending the conference ‘Geometry, Probability and their Synergies’ in Les Diablerets, organized by Hugo Parlier and Giovanni Peccati. As the name suggests, this was an opportunity to share cool research topics between what I previously thought to be the pretty distant worlds of probability and geometry, and to talk about math and spend time with people outside my usual research group. Almost all the seminars had a comprehensive and self-contained introductory first part. The other Uni.lu PhD students and I also followed a couple of preliminary classes the week before given by Parlier and Peccati.” In each of them I had the opportunity to get a good idea about some new (for me) objects like random hyperbolic surfaces, random polytopes, random walks on random graphs. The week started with a beautiful introduction by Ara Basmajian to hyperbolic surfaces and geodesic flow, which I know was also very appreciated by the group of probability PhD students. Personally, I got very excited during the seminar “Trace method for random hyperbolic surfaces, and spectral gap of the laplacian” held by Anantharaman, about the work on a conjecture left by Maryam Mirzakhani. And what a better way to conclude the week than with the Buser seminar about building hyperbolic three manifolds through polyhedra and Hugo’s happy birthday polyhedral cake. During the week there was also space for PhD student talks in Geometry, Probability and Number Theory about their own research. Lastly, but not less importantly, Les Diablerets is an incredible place to have a math conference: having the mountains full of snow surrounding your brain, and the possibility to ski or have a hike, are certainly creators of the greatest possible environment to do good math.
The organization of an event like this, with inspiring speakers such as Anantharaman, recently named professor at the College de France, which mixes aspiring scientists with fully fledged experts, is emblematic of DMATH’s international status and ambitions.
We thankfully acknowledge financial support from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (PRIDE17/1224660/GPS) and the Department of Mathematics.