Seminar announcement: A mathematician among biologists (Imperial College London)

Posted on Sun 10 June 2018 in Blog

Title

Invasive species: a mathematician among biologists

Abstract

This is a story about multidisciplinarity. It starts with a theoretical physicist being hired as a mathematician by a biology department. But what is the role of a mathematician in such a singular ecosystem? In this talk, we'll learn that the relation between biology and mathematics can be traced back to the XIII century. We'll also learn that the survival of plankton communities is strongly related with chaotic attractors, and how differential geometry had an unexpected role in a science communication problem.

Key references

  1. Huisman J, Weissing FJ. Biodiversity of plankton by species oscillations and chaos. Nature [Internet]. 1999 Nov 25;402(6760):407–10. Available here
  2. Gottwald GA, Melbourne I. On the Implementation of the 0-1 Test for Chaos. SIAM J Appl Dyn Syst [Internet]. 2009 Jan [cited 2017 May 9];8(1):129–45. Available here
  3. Zhou JX, Aliyu MDS, Aurell E, Huang S. Quasi-potential landscape in complex multi-stable systems. J R Soc Interface [Internet]. 2012 Dec 7 [cited 2017 Feb 28];9(77):3539–53. Available here
  4. Bhattacharya S, Zhang Q, Andersen ME. A deterministic map of Waddington’s epigenetic landscape for cell fate specification. BMC Syst Biol [Internet]. 2011 [cited 2017 Feb 28];5. Available here

Links

Department's website

Spacetime coordinates

  • 19 June 2018, 14:00-15:00 (local timezone)
  • Huxley Building, South Kensington Campus. Room 130. Imperial College London.

announcement