The Arithmetic of Chaos public lecture, Prof. Franco Vivaldi
Published on the 04 Feb 2015
Yesterday evening, we hosted a public lecture by Professor Franco Vivaldi, "The Arithmetic of Chaos". The lecture was part of this week's Workshop on Algebraic, Number Theoretic & Graph Theoretic Aspects of Dynamical Systems at UNSW.
Around 100 people gathered in Colombo Theatre C to hear Professor Vivaldi's lively and engaging presentation. Attendees included School members, high school students and teachers, staff from other Sydney universities, and UNSW students.
Professor Vivaldi, from Queen Mary University of London, addressed topics around chaos in arithmetic, obstructions to prediction and the limitations of computer programs in this pursuit, whether 
numbers have mass, and the role of random numbers.
Professor Vivaldi's research interests centre around arithmetic dynamics, a rapidly growing area of research which lies at the interface between dynamics and algebra, particularly algebraic number theory.
Professor Vivaldi is also scheduled as a plenary speaker on the fourth day of the Workshop, with a talk entitled "Renormalization in Two-dimensional Piecewise Isometries".