Mathematics Colloquium

In a simple symmetric random walk on Z, a particle jumps left or right with 50% chance independently at each time and space location. What if the jump probabilities are taken to be random themselves (e.g. uniformly distributed between 0% and 100%). In this talk we will describe the effect of this random environment on a random walk, in particular focusing on a new connection to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class and to the theory of quantum integrable systems. No prior knowledge or background will be expected.