报告人简介：Prof. Charles Newman，Charles Newman is Silver Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He holds a PhD and an MA from Princeton University and two BS degrees from MIT.
Newman is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a member of the International Association of Mathematical Physicists, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.


报告内容简介: In this talk we review a number of old results concerning certain statistical mechanics models and their possible connections to the Riemann Hypothesis.
A standard reformulation of the Riemann Hypothesis (RH) is: The (two-sided) Laplace transform of a certain specific function \Psi on the real line is automatically an entire function on the complex plane; the RH is equivalent to this transform having only pure imaginary zeros. Also \Psi is a positive integrable function, so (modulo a multiplicative constant C) is a probability density function.
A (finite) Ising model is a specific type of probability measure P on the points S=(S_1,...,S_N) with each S_j = +1 or -1. The Lee-Yang theorem (of T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for other work)) implies that for non-negative a_1, ..., a_N, the Laplace transform of the induced probability distribution of a_1 S_1 + ... + a_N S_N has only pure imaginary zeros.
The big question here is whether it's possible to find a sequence of Ising models so that the limit as N tends to infty of such distributions has density exactly C \Psi. We'll discuss some hints as to how one might try to do this.

主持人：羊丹平 教授

主办单位：数学系 科技处