Title: Amenability

Tatiana Nagnibeda (University of Geneva)
 

The notion of amenability was introduced by John von Neumann in 1929 in his work on the Banach-Tarski paradox. This very interesting property turns out to be related to various areas of mathematics, such as measure theory, representation theory, geometry, probability theory and more -- giving way to a number of equivalent reformulations, some of them conjectural. We will discuss amenability in relation with the algebraic structure of a (finitely generated) group, as well as with more probabilistic aspects, such as random walks and percolation.