Dr. Jan M. Swart

I was born 1970 in Drachten, the Netherlands, and studied theoretical physics at Groningen University from 1988-1994. From 1995-1999 I did my PhD in mathematics at Nijmegen University under the supervision of Frank den Hollander (thesis: Large Space-Time Scale Behavior of Linearly Interacting Diffusions). Between 1999 and 2005 I held postdoc positions at the TU Berlin (18 months), Erlangen (4 years) and Tübingen (the final 6 months). I obtained my habilitation at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2007 (thesis: Extinction versus unbounded growth). Since 2005 I have been at the Institute of Information Theory and Automatization of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague.

My research interests lie in probability theory, more specifically in the general area of interacting particle systems, percolation, and other models for space-time randomness with strong correlations. While much of the original impetus for studying these models came from theoretical physics, many of the models I have occupied myself with are (at least in part) motivated by problems from (population) biology. Since explicit solutions are usually not available, the art is to find methods that lead to good qualitative or approximative statements about these models. I am co-inventor of the Brownian net, a continuum model of branching and coalescing Browian motions.

Since 2007, I have usually taught one course each semester at Charles University on topics such as Interacting Particle Systems, Quantum Probability, Markov Chains, Large Deviations, Percolation, and Random Graphs. My lecture notes on Interacting Particle Systems are on the arXiv.