Lectures on Random Lozenge Tilings

Over the past 25 years, there has been an explosion of interest in the area of random tilings. The first book devoted to the topic, this timely text describes the mathematical theory of tilings. It starts from the most basic questions (which planar domains are tileable?), before discussing advanced topics about the local structure of very large random tessellations. The author explains each feature of random tilings of large domains, discussing several different points of view and leading on to open problems in the field. The book is based on upper-division courses taught to a variety of students but it also serves as a self-contained introduction to the subject. Test your understanding with the exercises provided and discover connections to a wide variety of research areas in mathematics, theoretical physics, and computer science, such as conformal invariance, determinantal point processes, Gibbs measures, high-dimensional random sampling, symmetric functions, and variational problems.

Vadim Gorin is a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a member of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a leading researcher in the area of integrable probability, and has been awarded several prizes, including the Sloan Research Fellowship and the Prize of the Moscow Mathematical Society.