Grant: Canada Research Chairs

The Central Limit Theory states that a large sum of small contributions will beclose to the normal distribution irrespective of the nature of the individual contributions. I study an analogue of this universality for random spatial systems. The large scale space-time behaviour of random systems exhibiting critical growth often approximates a stochastic process called Super-Brownian motion. The approximating systems include epidemic models, competing species models in mathematical ecology, percolation in statistical physics, or allele frequencies in population genetics. My research focuses on using this universality to study many of these interacting spatial systems and on extending this universal correspondence.