Jacob Calvert
I’m interested in collective behavior, which I study using probability theory and data science. Lately, I’ve been working on a principle of nonequilibrium self-organization and investigating how the behavior of a collective depends on the number of its constituents.
I’m a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech and a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. I spent Spring 2025 as the Berlekamp postdoctoral fellow at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute in Berkeley, CA.
For details on my academic background and experience as a professional data scientist, see my CV or About. For more on my research, check out my Google Scholar profile, Papers, or Posts.
This post highlights recent work which constitutes only the third rigorous result about planar diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA), a paradigmatic model of random, dendritic growth.
Given finite $A \subset \mathbb{Z}^2$, the harmonic measure of $x \in A$ is the probability that a simple random walk “from infinity” first visits $A$ at $x$. If $A$ has $n$ elements, what is the smallest positive harmonic measure that you can get?
This post discusses the intersection of some of my recent and forthcoming work in probability theory with studies of programmable matter and ant colonies.