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Friday, December 5, 2008 - 2:00pm

Konstantin Mischaikow

Rutgers University (Mathematics & Institute for Quantitative Biology)

Location

University of Pennsylvania

337 Towne

The realization that nonlinear dynamical systems often exhibit complicated often unpredictable behavior at all scales both in phase space and parameter space has resulted in a paradigm shift in our perspective of the physical world behaves. Nevertheless, mathematical models of physical systems are not meant to be applied at all scales and experimental constraints provide real limits to scales of measurement. This suggests the need to be able to study nonlinear systems and capture the dynamics that is either relevant or measurable down to an a priori well defined scale. In today's talk I will discuss our attempts to do this in the context of building a database for multiparameter nonlinear systems. As an example, I will consider a simple two age class density dependent Leslie model, where the parameters included mortality rate from the first year to the second and reproductive rates in the first and second years.