Walks on groups, counting reducible matrices, polynomials, and surface and free group automorphisms (Q2482870)

The paper under review represents a deep contribution to probability in group theory and it is hard to illustrate its impact on the future investigations on the topic. Therefore it is reasonable to overlap the abstract, being very general and leaving the reader to the pleasure of the discovering. The paper is devoted to prove sharp limit theorems on random walks on graphs with values in finite groups. The main results are applied to finite quotients of lattices in semisimple Lie groups (specifically, \(\text{SL}(n,\mathbb{Z})\) and \(\text{Sp}(2n,\mathbb{Z})\)) to show that a random element in one of these lattices has irreducible characteristic polynomials (over \(\mathbb{Z}\)). The proofs are very nice for use of different techniques which are proper of number theory, of algebraic geometry, of geometric group theory and of functional analysis. Roughly speaking, these techniques allow us to see that a random (in terms of word length) element of the mapping class group of a surface is pseudo-Anosov and that a random free group automorphism is irreducible with irreducible powers.