John Pike

Office: 580 Malott Hall
Email: jpike AT cornell DOT edu
Mailing Address:
Department of Mathematics
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-4201

General

I am currently a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 2013, under the supervision of Jason Fulman.

Additional information can be found in my C.V.

Research

My research is primarily concerned with discrete problems in probability and statistics. I am particularly interested in Markov chains defined on algebraic and combinatorial structures (such as groups, graphs, group representations, and hyperplane arrangements). I also enjoy working on distributional approximation using Stein's method techniques, and I am generally interested in thinking about any problem involving randomness.

A more detailed description is contained in my research statement.

Also, feel free to check out these papers:

• Mixing time and eigenvalues of the abelian sandpile Markov chain, with Daniel Jerison and Lionel Levine, submitted, 2015. (pdf)
   
• Poisson statistics of eigenvalues in the hierarchical Dyson model, with Alexander Bendikov and Anton Braverman, submitted, 2015. (pdf)
   
• Stein's method and the Laplace distribution, with Haining Ren, ALEA Lat. Am. J. Probab. Math. Stat. 11 (1), 2014. (pdf)
   
• Eigenfunctions for random walks on hyperplane arrangements, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Southern California, 2013. (pdf)
   
• A note on the Poincaré and Cheeger inequalities for simple random walk on a connected graph, arXiv preprint, 2012. (pdf)
   
• Convergence rates for generalized descents, Electron. J. Combin. 18 (1), P 236, 2011. (pdf)

Teaching

For the Spring 2016 semester, I will be teaching MATH 6720 (Probability Theory II).

Other Activities

• Cornell Probability Seminar
   
• Finger Lakes Probability Seminar
   
• Math Explorer's Club
   
• Cornell Mathematical Contest in Modeling