Junior Colloquium Series Seminar

I'll begin by explaining how to build a hyperbolic surface out of pants, and introducing the moduli space of all hyperbolic surfaces of fixed genus. I'll explain that this moduli space has a natural volume form, and explain Mirzakhani's famous calculation of the total volume in the simplest case. Then I'll turn to the study of random surfaces, and compare this to the study of random d-regular graphs. I'll conclude by telling you about a problem that I'm working on now. Speaker(s): Alex Wright (University of Michigan)