# Fractional Gaussian fields on surfaces and graphs

June 24, 2022

Group Members: Tyler Campos, Andrew Gannon, Benjamin Hanzsek-Brill, Connor Marrs, Alexander Neuschotz, Trent Rabe and Ethan Winters.

Overview: We will study and simulate on computers the fractional Gaussian fields and their discretizations on surfaces like the two-dimensional sphere or two-dimensional torus. The study of the maxima of those processes will be done and conjectures formulated concerning limit laws. Particular attention will be paid to log-correlated fields (the so-called Gaussian free field).

July 9, 2020

preprint

# Box-ball systems and RSK tableaux

July 8, 2020

Sém. Lothar. Combin.  85B  (2021), Art. 14, 12 pp.

Proceedings of the 33rd Conference on Formal Power
Series and Algebraic Combinatorics

Ben Drucker, Eli Garcia, and Rose Silver

A box-ball system is a collection of discrete time states representing a permutation,
on which there is an action called a BBS move. After a finite number of BBS moves
the system decomposes into a collection of soliton states; these are weakly
increasing and invariant under BBS moves. The students proved that when this
collection of soliton states is a Young tableau or coincides with a partition of a type
described by Robinson-Schensted (RS), then it is an RS insertion tableau. They also
studied the number of steps required to reach this state.

# Resistance scaling on affine carpets

July 2, 2020

## Overview

A celebrated result in analysis and probability on fractals is the construction of a diffusion on the standard Sierpinski Carpet by Barlow and Bass. One key part of their argument is a pair of upper and lower estimates for the resistances of precarpets: if $$K_n$$ denotes the level $$n$$ approximation of the carpet and $$E_n$$ is the minimal Dirichlet energy of a function that is identically 1 on one side of the carpet and identically 0 on the other side, then there are constants $$0<c\leq C< \infty$$ so that $$c\rho^n\leq E_n\leq C\rho^n$$. Estimates for $$\rho$$ are known but the exact value is not.

The Sierpinski-type carpets to which the preceding estimates of resistance have been extended are all self-similar. By contrast, in the setting of post-critically finite fractals, resistance scaling has been successfully studied also in the self-affine case, initially by Fitzsimmons, Hambly and Kumagai.

The goal of this project was to investigate what aspects of the Barlow-Bass approach to resistance estimation on carpets could be extended to the self-affine case, and to make numerical computations of the behavior of resistance in this setting and its dependence on the affine scalings.

# Decimation structure of the spectra of self-similar groups

August 3, 2019

## Overview

Physicists and mathematicians have used the self-similar nature of certain fractals to develop and study analytical structures on fractal spaces. We examine the analytical structure of a class of fractals that arise as limit sets of the Schreier graphs of the action of self-similar groups on infinite n-ary trees. In particular, we consider how the spectrum of a Laplacian operator on one level of a Schreier graph relates to the spectrum on the next level, a technique known as spectral decimation.

Grigorchuk and collaborators have developed a method to spectrally decimate Schreier graphs of several
important self-similar groups, and have derived significant consequences about the structure of amenable groups. Their method is related to a notion of spectral similarity arising from the work of Fukushima-Shima and Malozemov-Teplyaev. In the latter, a sufficient condition for spectral decimation for fractal graphs is obtained. We consider the analogous question for Schreier graphs of self-similar groups with the goal of understanding the class to which Grigorchuk’s approach is applicable.

# Hedging by Sequential Regression in Generalized Discrete Models and the Follmer-Schweizer decomposition

## Overview

In practice, financial models are not exact — as in any field, modeling based on real data introduces some degree of error. However, we must consider the effect error has on the calculations and assumptions we make on the model.  In complete markets, optimal hedging strategies can be found for derivative securities; for example, the recursive hedging formula introduced in Steven Shreve’s “Stochastic Calculus for Finance I” gives an exact expression in the binomial asset model, and as a result the unique arbitrage-free price can be computed at any time for any derivative security.

In incomplete markets this cannot be accomplished; one possibility for computing optimal hedging strategies is the method of sequential regression.  We considered this in discrete-time; in the (complete) binomial model we showed that the strategy of sequential regression introduced by Follmer and Schweizer  is equivalent to Shreve’s recursive hedging formula, and in the (incomplete) trinomial model we both explicitly computed the optimal hedging strategy predicted by the Follmer-Schweizer decomposition and we showed that the strategy is stable under small perturbations.

# Can we hear the shape of a fractal? Spectral analysis of self-similar sets

## Overview

Analytic structures on fractals have been analyzed extensively in the past 50 years both because of their interesting mathematical properties and their potential applications in physics. One important question in this area is how the spectrum of a Laplacian on a fractal reflects its geometry; one version of the corresponding problem for domains in Euclidean space was famously described in Kac’s question ”Can you hear the shape of a drum?”.
Some features of the spectra of self-similar sets, such as the asymptotic behavior of the eigenvalue counting function, can be obtained using renewal theory (as in the work of Kigami-Lapidus), but our interest is in more precise results that give the locations and multiplicities of eigenvalues explicitly. These are connected to a long strand of research in mathematical physics about the structure of spectra of Schrodinger operators ¨ and their relation to topological invariants of the underlying space (prominent results in this area are due to Landau, Peierls, Harper, Moser, Bellissard, and, recently, Avila and Jitomirskaya). One name for these results is gap-labeling theorems. For certain highly-symmetric self-similar sets, the computation of the gap structure of the Laplacian spectrum is possible using spectral decimation. We use this method to explicitly compute the gap structure for the Laplacian on a particular two-point self-similar graph and its fractal limit, and for Sierpinski graphs and the Sierpinski gasket.

# Resistance scaling on the Octacarpet

## Overview

The study of analytic structures on self-similar fractal sets was initiated by physicists who discovered that heat flow on such sets had sub-Gaussian rather than Gaussian scaling, indicating that the fundamental physics of these sets was very different than on manifolds. These results were first made rigorous for sets with a finite ramification property, but in the late 1980s, Barlow and Bass developed a corresponding theory on a class of generalized Sierpinski carpets. Their approach depends on taking a (weak) limit of Brownian motions on a suitable sequence of closed sets that intersect to the carpet. A key step in proving that the limiting object has sub-Gaussian scaling is showing that the resistance of the approximating domain of scale n is bounded above and below by ρ^n
for a factor ρ that depends on the carpet. Computing the exact value of ρ remains an open problem.

We consider the resistance scaling problem for the octacarpet, and more generally for 4N-carpets, with
the goal of showing analogous bounds for the resistance and obtaining numerical estimates for the resistance scaling factors.

# Geodesic Interpolation on the Sierpinski Gasket

July 9, 2018

## Overview

Geodesics (shortest paths) on manifolds such as planes and spheres are well understood.  Geodesics on fractal sets such as the Sierpinski Triangle are much more complicated.  We begin by constructing algorithms for building shortest paths and provide explicit formulas for computing their lengths.  We then turn to the question of interpolation along geodesics—given two subsets of the Sierpinski Triangle, we “slide” points in one set along geodesics to the other set.  We construct a measure along the interpolated sets which formalizes a notion of the interpolation of a distribution of mass, and we prove interesting self-similarity relations about this measure.