Lecturers
The six main lecturers of the summer school will be
Lindvall is the author of the first major monograph on couplings
(Lectures on the Coupling Method, Wiley 1992).
Thorisson is well known for his contributions to the foundations of the
coupling method, and is working on the book
Coupling, Stationarity and Regeneration (Springer, 1999).
Barbour is an expert in several areas of applied probability, and is
coauthor (with L. Holst and S. Janson) of the book Poisson
Approximation (Oxford Science Publications, 1992). Häggström,
Pemantle and Peres are all members of the young generation of probabilists
who have successfully applied couplings and related techniques to
problems concerning e.g. Markov chains, percolation and interacting particle
systems.
Course content
The school will start off with the basic theory and examples of couplings.
We will then gradually move on to more advanced material,
so that hopefully by the end of
the week we have touched upon the research frontier in at least a couple
of places. Convergence and stochastic domination will be recurrent themes
of the school. Much of the
emphasis will be on concrete examples and applications. Applied areas
that will be covered are e.g. Poisson approximation, and the
fashionable topic of exact Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation using
coupled chains.
There will also be an opportunity for
a limited number of participants to present contributed talks on
topics related to the theme of the school.
Last modified: Mon Mar 1 13:37:42 MET 1999