After one of my first presentations at the students' conference OpenReadings, I received a comment along the lines of "it's just some fancy randomness". Well, yes, but... Over the years, I have seen lots of otherwise good students who struggle with even the most basic statistical concepts. So, being "fancy" makes it reasonably hard. Furthermore, random processes underlie many important everyday systems.

This Veritasium video tells a fascinating story about how a petty feud between two Russian mathematicians led to the development of Markov chain formalism.

Over the last few weeks we, I and Rytis, have attended two conferences. One, Polish symposium, in Warsaw and the other, Lithuanian conference, in Kaunas.

Fig. 1:Some photos of us attending 46th Lithuanian National Physics Conference and XIII Polish Symposium on Physics in Economics and Social Sciences.

The Polish symposium was particularly interesting to me, because I got to see the directions in which Econophysics and Sociophysics are developing. We had a chance to hear about fractal complex networks, correlation dynamics in cryptocurrency markets, limit order book modeling (with presenters from Finnish and German institutions) and applications of agent-based modeling to variety of problems.

The Lithuanian conference allowed us to see what is being done here in Lithuania, and by Lithuanian scientists abroad.

We have also presented our recent advances. Both of my presentations (one talk and one poster) were about the same thing - the poll-delayed voter model [1]. While Rytis talked about our work on scaled voter model [2] (sadly, it might be too complicated for Physics of Risk) and about a brand new topic on stochastic diffusion he is developing together with one of his student.

References

• A. Kononovicius, R. Astrauskas, M. Radavičius, F. Ivanauskas. Delayed interactions in the noisy voter model through the periodic polling mechanism. Physica A 652: 130062 (2024). doi: 10.1016/j.physa.2024.130062. arXiv:2403.10277 [physics.soc-ph].
• R. Kazakevičius, A. Kononovicius. Anomalous diffusion and long-range memory in the scaled voter model. Physical Review E 107: 024106 (2023). doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.107.024106. arXiv:2301.08088 [cond-mat.stat-mech].

In this Numberphile video dr. James Grime tells about a practical tank counting problem from World War 2 and how it was approached by statisticians at that time.

This summer, 3Blue1Brown ran a series of guest videos. One of them is particularly interesting for the fans of statistical physics. The video describes physical and mathematical details of the simulation of the phase change.

The second video goes into the mathematical analysis of the vapor-liquid model (which is notably very much like the Ising model we mention occasionally). It is available on the Spectral Collective Youtube channel.

Another summer has ended, and we are back to uncover and learn new things! With the start of the new academic season, I want to dedicate more time to a few research directions I have started but have not fully committed to.

Sadly, this means less time for Physics of Risk. While I do have a list of models and other curiosities to share with you (the readers of Physics of Risk blog), the time I can reasonably allocate to the blog grows scarcer. This year will be much slower in terms of the original and interactive content.

Thank you for reading the blog, and I wish everyone a productive and inspiring new academic year!