Special Lecture: Permutations, matrices, and random growth

Given a random permutation on $N$ letters, how long is its longest increasing subsequence? Given a random Hermitian matrix with randomly distributed entries, how large is the largest eigenvalue? Given a random game of “sticky” Tetris, what does the configuration of tiles look like? Even though these three stories look very different than one another, their answers are all somehow the same in some sense. In this talk, we will look into a universal story that includes all three as special “cases”.