INHOMOGENEOUS RANDOM SYSTEMS Tuesday 27 and Wednesday 28 January 2009 - Schedule ESPCI 10 rue Vauquelin Paris Institut Henri Poincaré 11, rue Pierre et Marie Curie Paris

The aim of this annual workshop is to bring together mathematicians and physicists working on disordered or random systems, and to discuss recent developments on themes of common interest. Each of the two days is devoted to a specific topic:

Tuesday 27 January: Concentration inequalities. (ESPCI, amphi Langevin)

        Moderator: Michel Ledoux (Toulouse)

The concentration of measure phenomenon appears naturally in asymptotic geometric analysis where functions with small oscillations are almost constants. This phenomenon is rather general and produces often sharp bounds on the approximation of smooth functions on metric spaces around their mean values. Of isoperimetric origin, a number of various tools to produce and describe measure concentration phenomenona have been developed in the past years. It is used nowadays in various areas and applications, from functional and geometric analysis to statistical mechanics, disordered systems, random matrices, dynamical systems...

Preliminary list of Speakers: N. Gozlan, O. Guédon, A. Guionnet, C. Léonard, C. Roberto, F. Redig, B. Zegarlinski

Titles and abstracts

Wednesday 28 January: Random matrices. (IHP, amphi Hermite)

        Moderator: Alan Edelman (Boston)

The subject of random matrices already has some good folktales . A favorite is the unlikely meeting of a famous physicist and a famous number theorist over tea at Princeton. (If you don' know the story you must google "Dyson Montgomery having tea".) What is remarkable are the sparks that fly as theory meets applications. This legendary story covers how random matrix theory and the study of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function have been connected. What remains as lively today as then is what happens when a new applications area ``rediscovers' ' random matrix theory . Theories get applied and new questions get raised. Our hope is that this meeting will create new such sparks.

Preliminary list of Speakers: Ph. Biane, F. Bornemann, A. Edelman, J. Najim, P. Šeba, O. Zeitouni

Titles and abstracts The conference is free and open to all.