Friday, February 6, 2015 (12:30 p.m. in Yost 306)

Title: Typical marginals of convex bodies

Speaker: Mark Meckes (Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University MAMS Department)

Abstract: A recent theorem of Klartag asserts that if X is uniformly distributed in a high-dimensional isotropic convex body, then most linear functionals of X are approximately Gaussian in distribution.  This phenomenon has connections with observations going back to Maxwell and Archimedes, with modern roots in the work of Sudakov, Diaconis, and Freedman, among others.  I will give a survey of the history of Klartag’s theorem, partial results which preceded it, and recent
developments.