Preface

Summary

Within themenagerie of objects studied in contemporary probability theory, a number of related animals have attracted great interest amongst probabilists and physicists in recent years. The inspiration for many of these objects comes from physics, but the mathematical subject has taken on a life of its own and many beautiful constructions have emerged. The overall target of these notes is to identify some of these topics, and to develop their basic theory at a level suitable for mathematics graduates.

If the two principal characters in these notes are random walk and percolation, they are only part of the rich theory of uniform spanning trees, self-avoiding walks, random networks, models for ferromagnetism and the spread of disease, and motion in random environments. This is an area that has attracted many fine scientists, by virtue, perhaps, of its special mixture of modelling and problem-solving. There remain many open problems. It is the experience of the author that these may be explained successfully to a graduate audience open to inspiration and provocation.

The material described here may be used for personal study and also as the bases of lecture courses of between 16 and 48 hours duration. Little is assumed about the mathematical background of the audience beyond some basic probability theory, but students should be willing to get their hands dirty if they are to profit. Care should be taken in the setting of examinations, since problems can be unexpectedly difficult. Successful examinations may be designed, and some help is offered through the inclusion of exercises at the ends of chapters. As an alternative to a conventional examination, students could be asked to deliver presentations on aspects and extensions of the topics studied.

Chapter 1 is devoted to the relationship between randomwalks (on graphs) and electrical networks. This leads to the Thomson andRayleigh principles, and thence to a proof of Pólya's theorem. In Chapter 2,we describeWilson's algorithm for constructing a uniform spanning tree (UST), and we discuss boundary conditions and weak limits for UST on a lattice. This chapter includes a brief introduction to Schramm–Löwner evolutions (SLEs).