Professor Sevak's talk on The Abelian Sandpile Model

Description: Given a distribution of sand particles on the plane, the abelian sandpile model gives a simple rule which says that any position which has too many particles topples and sends particles to its neighbors. Eventually there are no tall stacks left and the sandpile settles. The final configuration has many interesting features and there are many open problems about it. For example, it is not know what the shape of the final configuration will be.

We will discuss a variant of the model where some particles disappear and show how the model can be connected to a probabilistic model of a walker walking randomly on the plane and demonstrate how this connection can be exploited to give exact formulas for the limit shape.

Society of Undergraduate Mathematics Students | Website | View More Events