POSTGRAD RESEARCH STUDENTS' SEMINAR

A PROBLEM IN THE STABILITY OF PERIODIC SYSTEMS

Date:Thursday, May 5
Time: 2pm
Room: Red Centre 3085

Afternoon tea to follow in common room

In 1971, Nobel prize-winning physicist, Edwin McMillan, published a paper
featuring the discovery a new breed of planar transformation. Spurred-on by a
challenge put to him at a seminar four years earlier, McMillan had sought to
find an example of a "non-linear area-preserving transformation with a finite
region of guaranteed stability." No known cases of such mappings were, up to
that time, known.

To the extent that he discovered not one but INFINITELY many of these
mappings, his success was boundless and beyond constraint. McMillan was The
Man.

In this talk, I shall explain McMillan's discovery and its significance to the
theory of 2D dynamical systems. Time permitting, I shall also discuss the
relevance of his work to my own current research.