Brownian web Brownian web In probability theory, the Brownian web is an uncountable collection of one-dimensional coalescing Brownian motions, starting from every point in space and time. It arises as the diffusive space-time scaling limit of a collection of coalescing random walks, with one walk starting from each point of the integer lattice Z at each time. What is now known as the Brownian web was first conceived by Arratia in his Ph.D. thesis and a subsequent incomplete and unpublished manuscript. Arratia studied the voter model, an interacting particle system that models the evolution of a population's political opinions. The individuals of
Brownian motion the right. The second moment is, however, non-vanishing, being given by This equation expresses the mean squared displacement in terms of the time elapsed and the diffusivity. From this expression Einstein argued that the displacement of a Brownian particle is not proportional to the elapsed time, but rather to its square root. His argument is based on a conceptual switch from the "ensemble" of Brownian particles to the "single" Brownian particle: we can speak of the relative number of particles at a single instant just as well as of the time it takes a Brownian particle to reach a given