Slides of a talk given at the Irish Mathematical Society 2018 Meeting at University College Dublin, August 2018.

Abstract Four generalisations are used to illustrate the topic. The generalisation from finite “classical” groups to finite quantum groups is motivated using the language of functors (“classical” in this context meaning that the algebra of functions on the group is commutative). The generalisation from random walks on finite “classical” groups to random walks on finite quantum groups is given, as is the generalisation of total variation distance to the quantum case. Finally, a central tool in the study of random walks on finite “classical” groups is the Upper Bound Lemma of Diaconis & Shahshahani, and a generalisation of this machinery is used to find convergence rates of random walks on finite quantum groups.

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