My class on “Non-commutative distributions” started today. The first lecture is already online, see our video platform. Actually, we have a new video system, so the sound should now be better than last term. I am not sure, though, whether this also applies to the frames.

The class will run during our summer term, which will end mid July. Since I will travel quite a bit during term, there will be some cancellations and reschedulings of lectures; nevertheless, I still hope that we will have in the end again something like 25 lectures.

The general topic of the class is progress which was made in the last couple of years on non-commutative distributions, and which relies on advances in

• the operator-valued version of free probability theory (in particular, for its analytic description)
• free analysis or free non-commutative function theory
• relating analytic questions about operators in von Neumann algebras with the theory (of Cohn et al.) of non-commutative linear algebra or the free skew field (aka as non-commutative rational functions)
• using the linearization trick to relate non-linear scalar problems with linear operator-valued problems

All of the above will be explained in the lectures. So don’t worry if you have no idea what all this actually means.

Much of this progress was actually achieved in recent years in the context of my ERC-Advanced Grant on “Non-Commutative Distributions”. As this grant has finished now, the class can also be seen as kind of final report for this.

I will assume some familiarity with basic functional analysis and complex analysis. It is surely also helpful to know at least a bit about free probability theory, but this can also be acquired by watching along the way a few of the videos from last term or reading relevant parts of the corresponding class notes.