I know they’re sent out automatically, but how about we make sure journals do not send out review request or reminders during weekends or holidays? I know, I should not be checking my email etc., but c’mon now. You can guess what prompted this…

Reading about school shooting over the years, I have always thought "but I would not happen here". Surreal to now read about a shooting at Brown—my wife and I both walking around the house in Brown sweaters—in one of the buildings that I have spent countless of hours in, right next to Applied Math.

Viktor Nilsson’s PhD defense is now on the way at KTH. Prof Luc Rey-Bellet setting things off.

First batch of new additions to the office, some new and some replacing lost/worn out copies. Holiday reading seems covered.

Happy to be invited as a Tandem Fellow at @aiasdk.bsky.social this coming February. Will be working on large deviations, simulations and points processes with Christian Hirsch. Also great to visit Århus again, it has been too long since last time.

🚨New work alert🚨 With (soon to defend) graduate student Viktor Nilsson we study large deviations for dynamic Schrödinger bridges using the weak convergence/control-theoretic framework. We prove uniform Laplace principles for bridge processes and combine with an LDP for the static problem.

Next stop: @tue.nl for a talk in the CASA colloquium. Always nice to come "home".

Donning the gown and beret of @tudelfteemcs.bsky.social for today's PhD defence by Serena Della Corte (here together with her supervisor Richard Kraaij). Really nice thesis and wonderful defence on PDEs, HJB equations and large deviations.

Roughly 5 months later, can you guess what email I had to write once more?

Anyone in the math GR / geometric analysis communiy know anyone who's in need of a postdoc around 1 year from now and would be interested in coming to the frozen wastelands of the north? (And has/will have a non-Euro PhD)

New opinion piece on the Swedish AI commission’s report and proposals, from @sverigesungaakademi.se

Re-reading this gem more than a decade after the first time. Great for beginning students as the similarities with, and lessons for, research are everywhere. Or just life in general really.

100% here for this.

Making a list of papers to bring on upcoming trips, mostly things that are not in my "main areas"—any suggestions for good papers from the last couple of years? Any suggestions welcomed; so far I have *a lot* on the overlap gap property and computational hardness (Gamarnik, Ben Arous and others...)

And we’re off! Great start but as usual too many interesting talks/sessions. And, of course, the heat. But, first world problems and all that…

Spending most of the week in Atlanta, anyone with rec's for where to go for food, drinks etc?

Chasing characters to remove in a "paper" for a class on pedagogy and it is a real "kill your darlings"-situation over here

Waiting for my MCMC to finish.

🚨New work alert🚨 This got a little lost with Federica's defence last week, but together with another student with put out a new preprint on large deviations for certain families of Schrödinger bridges. The work builds on that of Bernton, Ghosal and Nutz for ... arxiv.org/abs/2506.03999

And with that, we welcome Federica to the PhD family! A wonderful defence steered in a fantastic way by Christophe Andrieu as opponent and w. Sigrid Källblad from KTH as chair.

T-24h until Federica's PhD defence. I have somehow fallen into the role of event planner leading up to this; zero nerves about the actual defence, but stressed out of my mind about travel itineraries, directions and Google Maps links, restaurant reservations etc. www.kth.se/math/kalende...

Quintessential academic experience: finished a referee report I had been putting off for way too long earlier today. 20 min later a new referee request comes in, aaaaaaand now we’re back where we started.

It happens every time and yet I seem to forget between visits: coming to Brown and talking to the people here gives me such a boost of ideas and new problems to work on. Cannot overstate the influence this place has had for me.

Analysis is all fun and games until you have to go through someone else's proofs and make sure that yes, you can in fact take your deltas and epsilons that way...

Currently writing an email to an editor asking when we can expect reports on a paper we submitted in one of my students first year. She is defending her thesis in two months; we have 5 year PhD programs.

TIL of the existence of the "finfluencer", as in finance influencer, and there are few things I want to unlearn as much as this.

Happy for, and proud of, my not-for-much-longer grad student Federica Milinanni that got one of the prestigious Wallenberg postdoc grants to go and work with Chang-Han Rhee at Northwestern.

Speaking to secondary school students today and my planned approach, subsequently completely shut down by my wife:

In addition to the insanity of how it is being done, there is something very Hunger Games-esque in asking people to explain why their jobs should exist, i.e. why they should be able to pay rent etc.. Just unimaginable levels of callousness.

One week left people! Please share with anyone you think might be interested; official ad in the thread etc.

Kind of pleased that I have somehow managed to turn the pedagogical course I am currently in to me having to re-read Thurston's "On proof and progress..." and parts of Rota's philosophical work.

Got the ad out! Share with anyone who might be interested :) Two year postdoc in geometric analysis and/or mathematical general relativity: web103.reachmee.com/ext/I003/583...

New work by @mraginsky.bsky.social looks really interesting: arxiv.org/abs/2502.06709. A++ for the title alone.

What I did not think through prior to staying up and watching this year's Super Bowl (really, the K Dot show): wife being away on a business trip, and thus being alone with the kids. That 6 am alarm was brutal.

Hateration all up in the dancerie! Serena showing up, C-walking and all, is just *chef's kiss*

Well, we have once again made it to the "f' them time zones" day of the year, or as other people call it, Super Bowl Sunday. Eight years since I moved back from the US and still haven't figured out a good routine for this.

🚨New work alert🚨 Long overdue, our paper on large deviations for stochastic approximation is now up on arXiv. It is a rather meaty piece of work that considers asymptotics for a general class of stochastic approximation methods with decreasing step size and state-dependent noise. (1/n)

One of the joys of working with students just starting out in probability theory is to get to introduce them to the wonder that is Williams' "Probability with martingales".

In my office I literally have boxes of papers that have now gone through two moves, having barely been opened in over five years, and just last week I was telling my student how I refuse to throw them away. It is always a version of "there is a reason I kept it in the first place..."

Apropos of nothing: last couple of days (and, really, last few years) I have had multiple discussions touching on how my view of Annals of Probability has changed. I can't tell if it is the type of results being published/the focus of the journal, "vibes", or a change in my own research interests.

When I had visits to Georgia Tech about 10 years ago, almost everyone I met with told some version of the story about "that one time it snowed" and traffic went completely bonkers. Looks like we are in for it again....

Every day, against my better judgment, I am getting closer to committing to giving a course on (a combination of Ethier-Kurtz and) Bakry-Émery-Ledoux and related topics. This is not helping.

I am hiring a postdoctoral scholar with a start date summer or fall 2025. Projects will be focused on thermodynamically consistent generative models, broadly defined. If you’re interested, please send a CV and one paragraph about why you think you’d be a good fit to [email protected]

Arrived at the ski resort where we will be spending Christmas earlier today. First ride, 7 & 6 yo go down one of the closed slopes and head straight for the woods for some off-piste action. It is going to be a long five days...

🚨New PhD position 🚨 I have at least one PhD opening, starting fall 2025 (later might also be possible), to work on topics in probability theory. Official ad is out on Dec 20, in the meantime there is more information on my webpage—interested students are welcome to contact me. Spread the word!

For those that read Swedish, or want to use Google translate: our opinion piece on academic freedom in Sweden and how industry’s trying to steer the academy in certain directions

Apropos of absolutely nothing: If you have any reason to read anything by van Handel, do so. Even if you do not have an explicit reason, read some of his stuff. That's all.

Evergreen sequence of events: [September-me]: Sure, I will review this lengthy paper by mid-December, there is plenty of time. [Current me]: Oh s**t...

First time I have experienced overleaf being down when I actually have to use it. So, I guess indefinite break?

Downside to having 400 students in your class? 400 exams to grade... Took over the home office for a good couple of weeks.