The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration is required in advance – book your seat via Eventbrite
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Abstract
Since the time of Issac Newton, physicists have described natural processes through differential equations. Nowadays it is commonly acknowledged that solutions to differential equations are often chaotic: a small variation in initial conditions leads to a large and unpredictable change in the behaviour of the system.
One should, therefore, try to describe this behaviour statistically. However, in his inaugural lecture, Dimitry Turaev, Professor of Dynamical Systems at Imperial College London, will show that a system with chaotic behaviour often exhibits a variety of statistical patterns of such diversity that any attempt to comprehensively describe it will fail.
He will argue that this ultimate richness is the main characteristic feature of chaos in practically any given system and show how this fact could help explain otherwise unexplained physical phenomena, like the low temperature flicker-noise in metals.
Biography
Dimitry was born in 1963 in the city of Nizhny Novgord, Russia. He studied mathematics at the University of Nizhny Novgorod between 1980-85 and then worked at the same university as a researcher until 1996, before emigrating to Israel. He received is PhD in Mathematics in 1991 and has since held postdoc positions in Israel, Germany and US until 2003 when he became an associate professor at the Ben Gurion University in Israel. He joined Imperial College from 2007.