Bio:
Ramon van Handel is an associate professor and a member of the executive committee of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics (PACM) at Princeton University. He joined Princeton in 2008, first as a postdoc and then as an assistant professor. He received his Ph.D. in 2007 from Caltech. His honors include the NSF CAREER award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the Erlang Prize, the Princeton University Graduate Mentoring Award, and several teaching awards.
Van Handel’s research interests lie broadly in probability theory and its interactions with other areas of mathematics. He is particularly fascinated by the development of probabilistic principles and methods that explain the common structure in a variety of pure and applied mathematical problems. His recent interests are focused on high-dimensional phenomena in probability, analysis, and geometry. He has also done much work on conditional phenomena in probability and ergodic theory, and on applications of noncommutative probability.
Tutorial: Structured random matrices
I will describe different methods to bound the norms of
random matrices that possess a general underlying structure, such as an
arbitrary variance or covariance pattern of its entries. Such matrices
appear frequently in applications, but the toolbox for understanding their
behavior remains a work in progress. I will discuss classical methods,
some significant recent advances, and open problems in this area.