University of New South Wales - UNSW - News - MATHEMATICS/MASCOS SEMINAR 25 November, 2005

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:

Adding new road capacity can increase travel time for everyone;
Self-sustaining clusters can emerge even when it appears death rate exceeds reproduction;
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;
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.