David Aldous's Home Page

I have retired from Berkeley, effective end-June 2018. I now live near Seattle and am an Affiliate Professor (a.k.a. unpaid academic) in the UW Mathematics Department. However, I 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" and my "Essays and Musings" activities, below.

Recent activities

Steven Pinker's recent book Rationality strikes me as a well-written and engaging overview of a wide range of topics, mostly relating to probability and statistics, at a freshman level, but it is curiously lacking in novelty. See my amazon.com review.

Outside my professional competence, except for implicit assessments of probabilities of future catastrophes, I have reviewed the eloquent advocacy of longtermism in the new book

What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill.

Long review of an excellent new textbook-survey

Spatial networks: a complete introduction. From graph theory and statistical physics to real-world applications by Marc Barthelemy.

A shorter version has appeared on MathSciNet. This field offers substantial scope for future challenging theorem-proof mathematics research.

A few words about Aldous Huxley.

My reviews of three highly recommended new non-technical books:

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein.
Communicating with Data: The Art of Writing for Data Science by Deborah Nolan and Sara Stoudt.
The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread -- And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski.

I like to think of my current research as opening up minor lines of enquiry outside the currently active topics within mathematical probability. Here are brief comments.

(with F.T. Bruss) Gambling under unknown probabilities as a proxy for real world decisions under uncertainty. Simple examples of taking decisions based on perceived rather than true probabilities. Much scope for extensions.
Covering a compact space by fixed-radius or growing random balls One example of a process that can be defined on any compact metric space with any probability distribution as a parameter. Such processes are surprisingly rare -- can you think of others?
On the Largest Common Subtree of Random Leaf-Labeled Binary Trees. Previous order-of-magnitude gap was [n^{1/8}, n^{1/2}]; this paper improves lower bound to n^{0.336}. Here is an improved lower bound by Ali Khezeli. Should be possible to decrease upper bound slightly.
The Nearest Unvisited Vertex Walk on Random Graphs. For a typical n-vertex graph with distances to nearest neighbor of order 1, this deterministic walk covers the graph in length order n. Challenge: improve beyond order-of-magnitude for models of random graphs.

My page Essays and Musings maintains a large collection of items addressed to students and faculty in probability and statistics and the broader mathematical sciences. Some recent additions:

Regarding the relationship between judgments of a submitted paper by referees/editors and subsequent impact of the paper, measured by citations, I have added some small-scale data to my page Reviewer opinions versus subsequent citations.

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.

My Research Site

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

Teaching

For the record, here is a complete list of courses since 2001 (only the most recent version of each course is listed).

For many years I supervised these Undergraduate Research Projects.

Books

Probability Approximations via the Poisson Clumping Heuristic	Springer, 1989
Reversible Markov Chains and Random Walks on Graphs (with Jim Fill)	Draft chapters

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
International Member 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

Email address: aldousdj@berkeley.edu