Pocket groups and random walks on them

Abstract:   "Pocket groups" is how the speaker and co-author Tianyi Zheng calls a simple class of groups obtained from a construction that is rather simple-minded but not particularly familiar to most of us. This construction associates to a given countable group G another (bigger) group G*. There are similarities with the better known "lamplighter group" construction. In this talk, I will describe this construction and some basic results regarding random walk on these groups.

This is joint work with Tianyi Zheng, San Diego.