Research Interests
Shirshendu Ganguly's research concerns the study of randomness, particularly universality properties in spatially correlated structures. Various phenomena in nature ranging from forest fires, growth of bacteria, behavior of magnetic materials, as well as traffic flow, while superficially different, are expected to exhibit similar fluctuation theories. A particular class of predictions of such behavior was one of the central components of the recent Nobel prize in physics awarded to Giorgio Parisi. However, building a mathematical framework for a rigorous investigation of such models is one of the most important challenges in modern probability theory. This forms one of the main driving forces in Shirshendu's research. The techniques employed combine geometric ideas from percolation theory and concentration of measure with more algebraic inputs from random matrices, permutations and quantum integrable systems. A particular facet of this program that Shirshendu will focus on during his Miller Professorship concerns the study of chaotic and noise-sensitivity properties of such systems investigating how robust or fragile their behavior is under perturbations of parameters such as the underlying disorder or the system temperature. This will involve tools from Harmonic analysis and theoretical computer science and intuition from statistical physics.
Additional Terms
Miller Fellow, 2016 - 2018, Statistics and Mathematics
Host, 2022 - 2025
