In the recent years, much progress has been made in the mathematical understanding of the latter problem. In particular, it is now known that many natural models of random planar maps, for which the faces degrees remain small, admit a universal scaling limit, the Brownian map.
Other models, favorizing large faces, also admit a one-parameter family of scaling limits, called stable maps. The latter are believed to describe the asymptotic geometry of random maps carrying statistical physics models, as has now been established in some important cases (including the so-called rigid O(n) model on quadrangulations).
This mini-course will review the main aspects of these themes.
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