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SPEAKER:  Prof. Vasilis Papanicolaou, Washington U at Saint Louis and National Technical University of Athens

TITLE:  The Siblings of the Coupon Collector

ABSTRACT:  The classical coupon collector's problem is here extended to the case where the main collector shares her coupons with other members of her family. She remains the main collector, but she gives to her brothers all the coupons that she gets in double. When her coupon album is completed, her brothers' albums have, of course, some empty places. How many in average? We give an answer to that question by developing techniques of computing asymptotics of this average as $N to infty$, for a large class of families of coupon probabilities. We also give some illustative examples.