Seminar Details
2007-03-22 (16.30pm) : Colloquium CESAME/MAPA "Four examples of how mathematics is useful, even essential, for understanding complex systems."
At Euler building - local a.207
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Robert Mackay (Warwick university)
Abstract :
Four examples, from my own and others' work, are presented to demonstrate that mathematics is
useful and essential for understanding complex systems:
1. Adding new road capacity can increase travel time for everyone;
2. Self-sustaining clusters can emerge even when it appears death rate exceeds reproduction;
3. Everlasting self-localised excitations can occur even when linear theory would suggest they would radiate away, and media which are insulating for linear theory can be conducting nonlinearly;
4. Indecomposable spatially extended deterministic systems (as well as stochastic ones) can exhibit non-unique probabilistic behaviour and sensitivity to boundary conditions.