THEMATIC PROGRAM

December  8, 2024

Fall 2005 Renormalization and Universality in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics

Coxeter Lecture Series

November 23-25, 2005 -- 3:30 p.m.

Lai-Sang Young
(Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences)
A mathematical theory of strange attractors

held at the Fields Institute

Abstract:
Attractors play an important role in dynamical systems theory as they capture the large-time behavior of many orbits. I will report on some recent developments in the analysis of a class of attractors. These attractors occur naturally. They are chaotic, or "strange", in the sense that they have complex geometric structures, and their dynamics are unpredictable, generating statistics that resemble those from random stochastic processes.

The first lecture is an overview aimed at a general audience. In the second hour, I will try to paint a geometric picture of these attractors, and in the third, I will demonstrate how to verify the existence of attractors of this type in several situations, including periodically forced limit cycles and Hopf bifurcations for ODEs and evolutionary PDEs.

Thematic Program Home page


The Fields Institute Coxeter Lecture Series (CLS) brings a leading mathematician to the Institute to give a series of three lectures in the field of the current thematic program. The first talk is an overview for a general mathematical audience, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The other two talks are chosen, in collaboration with the organizers of the thematic program, to target specialists in the field.

 



Index of Fields Distinguished and Coxeter Lectures.