In the first meeting of the seminar we, and all participants who wish to do so, will each briefly introduce ourselves and our research interests. We will decide future talks and papers to read during this meeting.
Meteorologist Ed Lorenz was one of the founding fathers of chaos theory. In 1963, he showed with just three simple equations that the world around us could be both completely deterministic and yet practically unpredictable. More than this, Lorenz discovered that this behaviour arose from a beautiful fractal geometric structure residing in the so-called state space of these equations. In the 1990s, Lorenz’s work was popularised by science writer James Gleick. In his book Gleick used the phrase “The Butterfly Effect” to describe the unpredictability of Lorenz’s equations. The notion that the flap of a butterfly’s wings could change the course of future weather was an idea that Lorenz himself used in his outreach talks.
However, Lorenz used it to describe something much more radical than can be found in his three simple equations. Lorenz didn’t know whether the Butterfly Effect, as he understood it, was true or not. In fact, it lies at the heart of one of the Clay Mathematics Millennium Prize problems, and is still an open problem today. In this talk I will discuss Lorenz the man, his background and his work in the 1950s and 1960s, and will compare and contrast the meaning of the “Butterfly Effect" as most people understand it today, and as Lorenz himself intended it to mean. The implications of the “Real Butterfly Effect" for understanding the predictability of nonlinear multi-scale systems (such as weather and climate) will be discussed. No technical knowledge of the field is assumed.
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Further reading:
T.N.Palmer, A. Döring and G. Seregin (2014): The Real Butterfly Effect. Nonlinearity, 27, R123-R141.
Much has been written about the buy-to-let sector and its role in encouraging both high levels of leverage and increases in house prices. Now Oxford Mathematician Doyne Farmer and colleagues from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and the Bank of England have modelled that impact.
The University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum is not only an exhibitor of art, but home to vital artistic research. The museum’s collections are investigated by some of the world’s leading historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and… mathematicians?
Throughout November 2016, the Ashmolean Museum and Oxford Mathematics proudly present Random Walks, a series of short films that present the historical world through mathematical eyes.
We are getting better at predicting things about our environment - the impact of climate change for example. But what about predicting our collective effect on ourselves? We can predict the small things, but we fail miserably when it comes to many of the big things. The financial crisis cost the world trillions, yet our ability to forecast and mitigate the next economic crisis is very low. Is this inherently impossible? Or perhaps we are just not going about it the right way?
