The thematic one-month program New Developments in Free Probability and Applications, to be held at the CRM in March 2019, will highlight the depth and beauty of Free Probability theory as well as the various connections with other fields.

In the spring of 1991, Dan Voiculescu was the holder of the Aisenstadt chair at the CRM. At this time, free probability was still in its infancy and only known to a small group of enthusiasts. This was going to change. Voiculescu gave the Aisenstadt Lectures on free probability in Montréal, organizing the material and bringing it with the help of his students Ken Dykema and Alexandru Nica into a publishable form. The resulting book was the first volume in the CRM Monograph Series. On the timely occasion of the 50th birthday of the CRM, our thematic program will take place where the seed was sown, with Dan Voiculescu as one of the scholars-in-residence.

The program activities will be anchored by two one-week workshops. In the other two weeks, we expect to organize a special program aimed at bringing graduate students and postdoctoral fellows quickly to the frontiers of the subject.

Workshop 1: Free Probability: the theory, its extensions. (March 4-8, 2019)
Workshop 2: Free Probability: the applied perspective. (March 25-29, 2019)

The first workshop will be inclined more to the pure side of free probability, in particular: operator algebras and random matrix theory, and the second workshop will put its emphasis on applications, for example quantum information theory and mathematical physics.

Alice Guionnet will give the Aisenstadt Chair lecture series between both workshops.

We will focus our attention on recent developments of the field, which include — but are not limited to: traffic freeness, bi-free probability, analysis of free entropy, (free) quantum groups, functional inequalities in free probability, new applications to random matrix theory and quantum information theory, advances in free Malliavin calculus and regularity questions of distributions.

All participants at the CRM activities are required to register

A small amount of funding is available for graduate students or young researchers (see the tab on the right side).