2019 will again be a year with quite a few meetings around free probability.

The main event will be a month-long program on New Developments in Free Probability and Applications at CRM in Montreal in March 2019. There will be two workshops: one, at the beginning of March, on the theory and its extensions and the second, at the end of March, on the applied perspective. In the two weeks in between there will also be quite some activity, in particular, we are aiming at bringing graduate students and postdoctoral fellows quickly to the frontiers of the subject. Furthermore, Alice Guionnet will give the Aisenstadt Chair lecture series between both workshops.

This program is part of the year long celebration of the CRM’s 50th anniversary. It seems very appropriate to have such a meeting on the blossoming of free probability theory, and its promise for the future at the place where the seed was sown. In the spring of 1991 Dan Voiculescu was the holder of the Andre Aisenstadt chair at the CRM in Montreal during the ’91 operator algebra program. At this time, free probability was still in its infancy and only known to a small group of enthusiasts. This was going to change. Voiculescu gave the Aisenstadt Lectures on free probability in Montreal, organizing the material and bringing it with the help of his students Ken Dykema and Alexandru Nica into a publishable form. The resulting book was the first volume in the CRM Monograph Series and was instrumental for making the theory more generally accessible and attracting many, in particular young, researchers to the subject. It is still the most cited literature on free probability. Andu, Dan, and Ken (as well as a couple of other experts) will stay as Simons Scholars-in-Residence for the whole program at CRM

Another month-long program with a substantial free probability component will be the Focus Program on Applications of Noncommutative Functions at the Fields Institute in Toronto, June 10 – July 5, 2019. In particular, one of the workshops of the program, June 17-21, deals with applications of noncommutative functions to random matrices and free probability.

The focus program at the Fields Institute will also include a celebratory banquet on June 14, in honour of the 70th birthday of Dan Voiculescu.