Recorded 28 February 2025. Chi-Fang Chen of the University of California, Berkeley, presents "A new approach to 1/N expansion in random matrix theory" at IPAM's Free Entropy Theory and Random Matrices Workshop. Abstract: Random matrix quantities often exhibit a 1/N-expansion where the asymptotic limit of large dimension N− ∞ becomes tractable. In this talk, we give a simple way to control the finite dimension regime from the large-N limit using only soft arguments from polynomial approximation. This illustrates one of the key ideas for our new approach to strong convergence with Garza-Vargas, Tropp, and van Handel. Learn more online at: https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/workshops/free-entropy-theory-and-random-matrices/