Yet another Kiddie talk where I ramble about determinants of laplacians

It turns out you can take the determinant of some linear operators between infinite dimensional spaces (whoa). It turns out the Laplacian on a surface is one of those operators, and the determinant measures something geometric about the underlying space (Whoa!). It turns out that you can actually measure this by looking at random loops on your surface, and that this is a nice generalization of a discrete problem (WHOA!). In this accessible talk, I’ll explain these ideas and draw some pictures.