Speaker: 

Professor Oren Louidor

Institution: 

UCLA

Time: 

Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - 11:00am

Location: 

RH 306

We study a discrete-time resource flow in Z^d, where wealthier vertices attract the resources of their less rich neighbors. For any translation-invariant probability distribution of initial resource quantities, we prove that the flow at each vertex terminates after finitely many steps. This answers (a generalized version of) a question posed by Van den Berg and Meester in 1991. The proof uses the mass-transport principle and extends to other graphs.