Stein's method initially introduced in 1970 by C. Stein is a powerful technique for bounding the distance between the laws of two real-valued random variables. Stein's method has been used to prove distributional convergence to many standard probability distributions such as normal, multivariate normal, Poisson and Brownian motion approximation. In...
The topic of statistical mechanics has been studied for over a century, and it is one of the pillars of modern physics. This theory can be applied to the study of the thermodynamic behavior of large systems of interacting particles, in which case it is referred to as equilibrium statistical...
In this dissertation, we use Fourier-analytic methods to study questions of equidistribution on the compact abelian group Zp of p-adic integers. In particu- lar, we prove a LeVeque-type Fourier analytic upper bound on the discrepancy of sequences. We establish p-adic analogues of the classical Dirichlet and Fejér kernels on R/Z,...
Markov chains have long been used to sample from probability distributions and simulate dynamical systems. In both cases we would like to know how long it takes for the chain's distribution to converge to within varepsilon of the stationary distribution in total variation distance; the answer to this is, called...