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Mathematics/MASCOS Seminar

Published on the 29 Nov 2005

Mathematics/MASCOS Seminar


SPEAKER:Professor Robert MacKay FRS
Director of Mathematical Interdisciplinary Research
Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick
Distinguished UNSW MASCOS and COSNet Visitor

DATE: Friday, November 25, 2005

TIME: 2 p.m.

VENUE: Room 4082, Level 4, Red Centre, UNSW

TITLE: Examples of how mathematics is useful (even essential) for understanding complex systems

ABSTRACT:
I will present four examples, from my own and others' work, to demonstrate that mathematics is useful and essential for understanding complex systems, both closed and open:

  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 systems, stochastic (e.g. sociology/epidemiology/ecology) and deterministic (perhaps turbulence?) can exhibit non-unique probabilistic behaviour and sensitivity to boundary conditions.