David Aldous's Home Page

I have retired from Berkeley, effective end-June 2018. However I will continue with light-duty research and professional activities. In particular I have been updating and expanding my open research problems page. But I am focussing more on my ongoing "Probability and the Real World" activities, below.

July 2018 official launch! Previously haphazard material now organized and expanded. "Probability and the Real World" project What aspects of the real world involve chance? What does mathematical probability tell us about those aspects? What concepts from mathematical probability can be illustrated by interesting real data? This web site records my efforts to articulate some answers to such questions. It is aimed at readers who have either read some "popular science" style account of probability, or taken a college course involving probability. Short cut to Reviews of non-technical books relating to Probability.

Not a Blog: Essays, Musings and Observations

(23 February 2020): The serious contender principle is working pretty well so far for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination: maximum Predictit prices so far are

Sanders	Warren	Biden	Bloomberg	Harris	Buttigieg	Yang
65	51	43	34	29	24	14

Recall that the principle says that (on average) there should be
2 candidates whose maximimum price exceeds 50
3 candidates whose maximimum price exceeds 33
4 candidates whose maximimum price exceeds 25
5 candidates whose maximimum price exceeds 20
so the fluctuations in perceived winning probabilities are close to typical.

(February 2020): Another 2 minute speech, this time from Persi Diaconis's 75 birthday celebration. I remain available at low rates .....

(January 2020): Because of my interest in probability assessments for the medium-long term future I always look at the annual Global Risks Report. Here is the entire report and here is the key graphic I discuss in class and popular talks. Looking at predictions from 5 or 10 or 15 years ago gives some sense of how accurate such consensus predictions have been. Unfortunately neither the likelihoods nor the economic impacts are honestly quantitative; they just ask participants to assess "on a scale of 1 to 5" with only verbal descriptions of those numerical meanings. Note that the risks assessed as most serious are climate change related.

(December 2019): I have written both a longer PDF review and a shorter amazon.com review of Ian Stewart's Do Dice Play God: The Mathematics of Uncertainty.

(December 2019): Analogous to Wikipedia's nice "zooming in" demonstration of Brownian scaling, Yucheng Wang has made this MP4 demonstration of the emergence of scale-invariance when we grow a network in the plane by adding random points and using a scale-invariant rule for linking them to the existing network. See this page for explanation.

(August 2019): A coincidence question. Almost all probability-related questions on Quora are elementary or inane, but I noted a recent one (ironically, soon deleted) that was more interesting to me.

What are the odds that at least 2 players of a 128 players tournament face each other 2 consecutive years?

Here is my brief analysis.

My Research Site Short cut to Papers and preprints and to slides from recent talks and to open research problems.

Teaching

For many years I supervised these Undergraduate Research Projects.

Books

Professional Activities

• Associate Editor, American Mathematical Monthly and Annales Henri Lebesgue.
• Chair of committee that awards the biennial Loeve Prize in mathematical probability.
• Fellow of the Royal Society
• Foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences
• Slides from the talks at the conference on the occasion of Jim Pitman's 65th birthday are available via that link.

Personal stuff Humor, photos, outside activities, .......

Contact information

Postal Address: T.B.A.
Telephone: fuhgeddaboudit
E-mail address: aldousdj@berkeley.edu