[Math_club] UO Math Club, Week 7, Meeting, Guest Speaker: Sebastian Jaramillo Diaz.

[Milo Tiemann]

Hello Everyone,

The UO Math Club will welcome a guest speaker, Sebastian Jaramillo Diaz, who will present about Research in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, on (this) Wednesday, May 13th, 2026, Week 7, 5:00pm, University 213 (same room as last quarter).

As always, there will be free pizza.

We hope to see all of you there.

Here is the abstract:
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is one of the most powerful algorithms for sampling from complicated probability distributions, but most of its theory is built around Gaussian momentum. In this talk, I will explore what changes when the momentum is instead chosen from a Laplace distribution.
The main example is the exact HMC on the circle, with a von Mises target distribution. Although this is a simple geometric setting, it reveals several subtle phenomena: the dynamics are no longer governed by a smooth kinetic energy, standard contraction arguments break down, and the behavior of nearby particles becomes highly dependent on the geometry of the target and the choice of integration time.
I will discuss how shared-momentum couplings can be used to study whether HMC contracts distances in expectation, why the Laplace case requires new ideas, and what this example teaches us about the design and analysis of HMC algorithms beyond the classical Gaussian framework. The goal is to give both intuition and mathematical structure for understanding how non-Gaussian momentum can affect mixing, stability, and efficiency.
Best,
UO Math Club.

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