On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
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The Mallows measure on the symmetric group S_n assigns to each permutation a probability proportional to a parameter q to the power of the inversion number. It was originally introduced in 1957 in the context of statistical ranking theory, and has been used in many areas including statistical physics, learning theory, mixing times, and finite dependence. Gale-Shapley stable marriage is a cornerstone of economic theory as well a mathematical gem. Introduced in 1962, it was the subject of the 2012 Nobel prize in economics, awarded to Roth and Shapley. I’ll explain how the two objects are related. In particular, the former is an example of the latter. Among other things this gives a simple and elegant new description of the Mallows measure on the infinite line Z, provided one does not get distracted by “wild matchings”!
