The self-avoiding walk: A brief survey

Abstract

Simple random walk is well understood. However, if we condition a random walk not to intersect itself, so that it is a self-avoiding walk, then it is much more difficult to analyse and many of the important mathematical problems remain unsolved. This paper provides an overview of some of what is known about the critical behaviour of the self-avoiding walk, including some old and some more recent results, using methods that touch on combinatorics, probability, and statistical mechanics.