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M.Sc. (Mathematical Statistics) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Every triangle has a unique point, called the conformal center, from which a random (Brownian motion) path is equally likely to first exit the triangle through each of its three sides. We use concepts from complex analysis, including harmonic measure and the Schwarz-Christoffel map, to locate this point. We could not obtain an elementary closed form expression for the conformal center, but we show some series expressions for its coordinates. These expressions yield some new hypergeometric series identities. Using Maple in conjunction with a homemade Java program, we numerically evaluated these series expressions and compared the conformal center to the known geometric triangle centers. Although the conformal center does not exactly coincide with any of these other centers, it appears to always lie very close to the Second Morley point. We empirically quantify the distance between these points in two different ways. In addition to triangles, certain other special polygons and circles also have conformal centers. We discuss how to determine whether such a center exists, and where it will be found.

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Thesis (doctoral)--Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 120-125).

No / The motion of an artificial micro-scale swimmer that uses a chemical reaction catalyzed on its own surface to achieve autonomous propulsion is fully characterized experimentally. It is shown that at short times, it has a substantial component of directed motion, with a velocity that depends on the concentration of fuel molecules. At longer times, the motion reverts to a random walk with a substantially enhanced diffusion coefficient. Our results suggest strategies for designing artificial chemotactic systems.

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Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE(kappa)) is an important contemporary tool for identifying critical scaling limits of two-dimensional statistical systems. The SLE(kappa) one-parameter family of processes can be viewed as a special case of a more general, two-parameter family of processes we denote SLE(kappa, mu). The SLE(kappa, mu) process is defined for kappa>0 and real numbers mu; it represents the solution of the chordal Loewner equations under special conditions on the driving function parameter which require that it is a Brownian motion with drift mu and variance kappa. We derive properties of this process by use of methods applied to SLE(kappa) and application of Girsanov's Theorem. In contrast to SLE(kappa), we identify stationary asymptotic behavior of SLE(kappa, mu). For kappa in (0,4] and mu > 0, we present a pathwise construction of a process with stationary temporal increments and stationary imaginary component and relate it to the limiting behavior of the SLE(kappa, mu) generating curve. Our main result is a spatial invariance property of this process achieved by defining a top-crossing probability for points in the upper half plane with respect to the generating curve.

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