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The hard hexagon model in statistical mechanics

Probability

Speaker: Professor Rodney Baxter, UC Berkeley
Location: 693 Kerr
Start time: Thu, Apr 8 1999, 4:10PM

The hard hexagon model is the problem of counting the number of ways of placing particles on the sites of the triangular lattice so that no two particles are together or adjacent. It turns out that this problem is exactly solvable (while the corresponding problems on the square and honeycomb lattices are not). I shall discuss how, by a series of happy chances, this was discovered.