From malaria to chatGPT: the birth and strange life of the random walk

The Dean’s Distinguished Lecture in the Natural Sciences for 2024 features Professor Jordan S. Ellenberg from UW-Madison.

The “random walk” is a mathematical concept which underlies the way scientists now think about everything from stock markets to Wisconsin’s legislative districts to the latest developments in AI. Ellenberg will talk about the surprising history of this concept, which between 1905-1910 was invented simultaneously by multiple people in multiple countries for completely different purposes, from mosquito control to physics to finance to winning a theological argument (really!) And then he will move to the present day and talk about the rise of large language models, the modern descendants of the random walk. Are they just mindless algorithms, or can they generate authentically new ideas in writing and math?

Ellenberg is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at UW-Madison. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers “How Not to be Wrong,” and “Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Absolutely Everything,” as well as many research papers. Most recently he has been collaborating with Google DeepMind on projects at the interface of math and artificial intelligence.

Books can be purchased from Boswell Book Company at the event and a book signing with Ellenberg immediately follows the lecture. Book sales are credit or debit only.