Jonathan Breuer: To infinity and back (a bit)

Abstract: This is a colloquium style talk. Let H be a self-adjoint operator defined on an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. Given some spectral information about H, such as the continuity of its spectral measure, what can be said about the asymptotic spectral properties of its finite dimensional approximations? This is a natural (and general) question, and can be used to frame many specific problems such as the asymptotics of zeros of orthogonal polynomials, or eigenvalues of random matrices. We shall discuss some old and new results in the context of this general framework and present various open problems.