Ben Morris

I am a professor in the Mathematics Department at UC Davis. My research interests include Markov chain Monte Carlo, random walks on graphs and probability on trees. My cv can be found here.

Teaching

21B

Publications

Improved mixing time bounds for the Thorp shuffle. Preprint. http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.2759

(with Steve Evans and Arnab Sen) Coalescing systems of Brownian particles on the Sierpinski gasket and stable particles on the line or circle. Preprint. http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.0017

(with Phil Rogaway and Till Stegers) How to Encipher Messages on a Small Domain: Deterministic Encryption and the Thorp Shuffle. CRYTO 2009.pdf

Spectral gap for the interchange process in a box. Electronic Communications in Probability 13 (2008). http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/0805.0480

Improved Mixing time bounds for the Thorp shuffle and L-reversal chain. To appear in Annals of Probability. http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/0802.0339

(with Russell Lyons and Oded Schramm) Ends in uniform spanning forests. To appear in Electronic Journal of Probability. http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/0706.0358

The mixing time of the Thorp shuffle. SIAM journal on computing, STOC 2005 special issue. ps

Spectral gap for the zero range process with constant rate. Annals of Probability 34 (2006). ps

The mixing time for simple exclusion. Annals of Applied Probability 16 (2006). ps

(with Yuval Peres) Evolving sets, mixing and heat kernel bounds.  PTRF 133 (2005). ps

The Components of the Wired Spanning Forest are Recurrent.  PTRF 125 (2003), pp. 259-265.    ps

(with Alistair Sinclair) Random Walks on Truncated Cubes and Sampling 0-1 knapsack solutions.

SIAM journal on computing 34 (2004), pp. 195-226. ps

Improved Bounds for Sampling Contingency Tables.  Random Structures and Algorithms 21 (2002), pp. 135-146.   ps

Random Walks in Convex Sets (thesis).     ps