Oxford Mathematician Ricardo Ruiz Baier, in collaboration mainly with the biomedical engineer Alessio Gizzi from Campus Bio-Medico, Rome, have come up with a new class of models that couple diffusion and mechanical stress and which are specifically tailored to the study of cardiac electromechanics.
In this collaboration with researchers from the University of Louvain, Renaud Lambiotte from Oxford Mathematics explores the mixing of node attributes in large-scale networks.
Knots are widespread, universal physical structures, from shoelaces to Celtic decoration to the many variants familiar to sailors. They are often simple to construct and aesthetically appealing, yet remain topologically and mechanically quite complex.
Knots are also common in biopolymers such as DNA and proteins, with significant and often detrimental effects, and biological mechanisms also exist for 'unknotting'.