- Series
- Job Candidate Talk
- Time
- Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - 11:00am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 269
- Speaker
- Rafael de le Llave – Department of Mathematics, University of Texas, Austin
- Organizer
- Howie Weiss
Many mechanical systems have the property that some small perturbations can accumulate over time to lead to large effects. Other perturbations just average out and cancel. It is interesting in applications to find out what systems have these properties and which perturbations average out and which ones grows. A complete answer is far from known but it is known that it is complicated and that, for example, number theory plays a role. In recent times, there has been some progress understanding some mechanisms that lead to instability. One can find landmarks that organize the long term behavior and provide an skeleton for the dynamics. Some of these landmarks provide highways along which the perturbations can accumulate.