Serte Donderwinkel (she/her)

Bachelor or master project?

I am happy to supervise bachelor or master students from Groningen that want to work on a question in discrete probability theory. Together, we can look for a topic that we are both interested in. Feel free to send an email or to drop by my office! 

Teaching

I teach Introduction to Graph Theory for first-year bachelor students and Combinatorial Mathematics B (on random graphs) for first and second-year master students. In April, I will be an invited professor at ENS Paris, where I will teach a mini-course on local and global convergence of random trees. 

Women+ lunch

With Leah Dijkshoorn, we organize a monthly lunch meeting for female and non-binary identifying master students and academic staff in (applied) mathematics in Groningen. Send me an email if you are interested in attending!

Upcoming events

1. Science is Wonderful, EU outreach fair, March 2026, Brussels, Belgium

2. Invited Professorship, École Normale Superieure, April 2026, Paris, France

3. Probability Colloquium, École Normale Superieure, April 2026, Paris, France

4. CWI Themed Semester on phase transitions in probability, combinatorics and algorithms, March-May 2026, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, organiser

5. UT Mathematics of Data Science seminar, May 2026, Twente, The Netherlands

6. ISM Discovery School on Recent advances in probability and combinatorics, June 2026, Montréal, Canada

7. SPA, June 2026, Ithaca, US, prize lecture

8. BIRS workshop 'Discrete and continuous random trees' , November 2026, Oaxaca, Mexico, Faculty lead

9. BIRS-CMI workshop 'Discrete Probability and Network Statistics', December 2027, Chennai, India, organiser

Research

1. Omer Angel, Caelan Atamanchuk, Anna Brandenberger, Serte Donderwinkel, Robin Khanfir, The largest common subtree of two random trees, 2025, arXiv:2601.00119

2. Serte Donderwinkel, Joost Jorritsma, Guillem Perarnau, An elementary proof for the bunkbed conjecture for forests, 2025, arXiv:2511.13589 

3. Omer Angel, Shankar Bhamidi, Serte Donderwinkel, Neeladri Maitra, Akshay Sakanaveeti, Evolution of recursive trees with limited memory, 2025, arXiv:2510.18856

4. Louigi Addario-Berry, Sasha Bell, Prabhanka Deka, Serte Donderwinkel, Sourish Maniyar, Minmin Wang, Anita Winter, Revisiting scaling limits for critical inhomogeneous random graphs with finite third moments, 2025, arXiv:2509.08439

5. Michal Bassan, Serte Donderwinkel, Brett Kolesnik, To see the forest for the trees: On the infinite divisibility of unlabeled forests, 2025, arXiv:2507.16650

6. Louigi Addario-Berry, Serte Donderwinkel, Christina Goldschmidt, Rivka Mitchell, Discrete snakes with globally centered displacements, 2025, arXiv:2505.21823

7. Anna Brandenberger, Serte Donderwinkel, Céline Kerriou, Gàbor Lugosi, Rivka Mitchell, Temporal connectivity of Random Geometric Graphs, 2025, arXiv:2502.15274 

8. Serte Donderwinkel and Robin Khanfir, Tight universal bounds on the height times the width of random trees, 2024, arXiv:2501.00458, To appear in Probability Theory and Related Fields

9. Michal Bassan, Serte Donderwinkel and Brett Kolesnik , Tournament score sequences, Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv numbers, and the Lévy-Khintchine method, 2024, arXiv:2407.01441

10. Michal Bassan, Serte Donderwinkel and Brett Kolesnik, Graphical sequences and plane trees, 2024, arXiv:2406.05110, to appear in Combinatorics, Probability and Computing

11. Louigi Addario-Berry, Marie Albenque, Serte Donderwinkel and Robin Khanfir, Refined Horton-Strahler numbers I: a discrete bijection, 2024, arXiv:2406.03025

12. Louigi Addario-Berry, Simon Briend, Luc Devroye, Serte Donderwinkel, Gábor Lugosi and Céline Kerriou, Random friend trees, 2024, arXiv:2403.20185 

13. Serte Donderwinkel and Brett Kolesnik, Asymptotics for Sinaĭ excursions, 2024, arXiv:2403.12941, to appear in Journal of Statistical Physics

14. Serte Donderwinkel and Brett Kolesnik, Tournaments and random walks, 2024, arxiv:2403.12940 

15. Louigi Addario-Berry, Serte Donderwinkel and Igor Kortchemski, Critical trees are neither too short nor too fat, Annales Henri Lebesgue, 8: 113--149 (2025), DOI: 10.5802/ahl.231 

16. Paul Balister, Serte Donderwinkel, Carla Groenland, Tom Johnston and Alex Scott, Counting graphic sequences via integrated random walks, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 378: 4627--4669 (2025),  DOI: 10.1090/tran/9403

17. Louigi Addario-Berry and Serte Donderwinkel, Random trees have height O(√n), Annals of Probability. 52(6): 2238-2280 (2024),  DOI: 10.1214/24-AOP1694 

18. Louigi Addario-Berry, Arthur Blanc-Renaudie, Serte Donderwinkel, Mickaël Maazoun, and James Martin, The Foata–Fuchs proof of Cayley’s formula, and its probabilistic uses, Electron. Commun. Probab. 28: 1-13 (2023), DOI: 10.1214/23-ECP523

19.  Serte Donderwinkel and Zheneng Xie, Universality for the directed configuration model: metric space convergence of the strongly connected components at criticality, Electronic Journal of Probability. 29: 1-85 (2024), DOI:10.1214/24-EJP1131

20.  Serte Donderwinkel, Height process convergence of supercritical Galton-Watson forests, with an application to the configuration model in the critical window, Advances in Applied Probability. 56, 1064–1105 (2024), DOI: 10.1017/apr.2024.3

Theses

1. The structure of large random graphs, PhD Thesis, August 2022, supervised by Christina Goldschmidt

2. The ant in the labyrinth, written in April 2018 as part of Part iii of the Mathematics Tripos at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Perla Sousi, primarily based on a paper by Noam Berger, Nina Gantert and Yuval Peres

3. Stein's method applied to preferential attachment graphs, written in June 2016 as part of BSc in Mathematics at the University of Groningen, supervised by Daniel Rodrigues-Valesin and Aernout van Enter, primarily based on a paper by Nathan Ross