MARK KAC SEMINAR

introduction	talks	archive	contact	location

Introduction

The `Mark Kac seminar on Probability and Physics' is a monthly meeting held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, between probabilists and statistical physicists. The range of topics covered includes:

• Interacting particle systems
• Ergodic theory and dynamical systems
• Gibbs random fields and percolation
• Disordered media
• Quantum mechanics and quantum probability
• Stochastic processes and large deviations

The seminar originally started in 1977 with informal meetings of a small group of Dutch mathematicians and physicists discussing topics in their common field of interest. Following a suggestion by P.W. Kasteleyn, one of the founding fathers of statistical physics in the Netherlands, the seminar was named after Mark Kac in 1985. Mark Kac had close contacts with many Dutch scientists and was a regular visitor until his death in 1984. His work is at the very core of the area in mathematical physics that the seminar tries to cover.