Taming infinities
Some physical and mathematical theories have the unfortunate feature that if one takes them at face value, many quantities of interest appear to be infinite! What's worse, this doesn't just happen for some exotic pieces of abstract mathematics, but in the standard theories describing some of the most fundamental aspects of nature. Various techniques, usually going under the common name of "renormalisation" have been developed over the years to address this, allowing mathematicians and physicists to tame these infinities. We will tip our toes into some of the conceptual and mathematical aspects of these techniques and we will see how they have recently been used in probability theory to study equations whose meaning was not even clear until now.