Gaussian Processes on Trees: From Spin Glasses to Branching Brownian Motion (Cambridge Studies in Advanced Mathematics)

Branching Brownian motion (BBM) is a classical object in probability theory with deep connections to partial differential equations. This book highlights the connection to classical extreme value theory and to the theory of mean-field spin glasses in statistical mechanics. Starting with a concise review of classical extreme value statistics and a basic introduction to mean-field spin glasses, the author then focuses on branching Brownian motion. Here, the classical results of Bramson on the asymptotics of solutions of the F-KPP equation are reviewed in detail and applied to the recent construction of the extremal process of BBM. The extension of these results to branching Brownian motion with variable speed are then explained. As a self-contained exposition that is accessible to graduate students with some background in probability theory, this book makes a good introduction for anyone interested in accessing this exciting field of mathematics.

Anton Bovier is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Bonn. He is the author of more than 130 scientific papers and two monographs, Statistical Mechanics of Disordered Systems: A Mathematical Perspective (Cambridge, 2006) and Metastability: A Potential-Theoretic Approach (with Frank den Hollander, 2016). Bovier is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and a member of the Clusters of Excellence, The Hausdorff Center for Mathematics and ImmunoSensation, both at the University of Bonn.