From mosquitoes to ChatGPT — the birth and strange life of the random walk

About the talk:

Between 1905 and 1910 the idea of the random walk, now a major topic in applied math, was invented simultaneously and independently by multiple people in multiple countries for completely different purposes, from mosquito control to physics to finance to winning a theological argument (really!) I’ll tell some part of this story and also gesture at ways that random walks (or Markov processes, named after the theological arguer) underlie current approaches artificial intelligence, and what this tells us about the capabilities of those systems now and in the future.

About the speaker:

Jordan Ellenberg is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, specializing in number theory and algebraic geometry, with related interests in algebraic topology, combinatorics, and data science. Ellenberg has held an NSF-CAREER grant, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2013 he was named one of the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. He is also a popularizer of mathematics; his journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Wired, The Believer, and the Boston Globe, and is the author of the New York Times bestseller How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking.