Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Permutation entropy was introduced as a complexity measure of time series. Formally, it replaces the symbol blocks in the definition of Shannon entropy by the so-called ordinal patterns –a digest of the ups-and-downs along a finite orbit in a totally ordered state space. Later, this concept was extended to self maps of n-dimensional intervals, in metric and topological versions. It can be proven that, under some assumptions, the metric and topological permutation entropy coincide with their corresponding conventional counterparts. Besides its use as an entropy estimator, permutation entropy has found some interesting applications. We will talk about the detection of determinism in noisy time series, and the recovery of the control parameter from the symbolic sequences of a unimodal map (which allows to cryptanalize some chaotic ciphers).

I will review results from binary black hole simulations and the role that these simulations have in astrophysics and gravitational wave observations. I will then focus on the mathematical and computational aspects of the recent breakthroughs in numerical relativity that have made finding binary black hole solutions to the Einstein field equations an almost routine exercise.

Nonlinear wave phenomena are of great importance in the physical world and have been for a long time a challenging topic of research for both pure and applied mathematicians. There are numerous nonlinear evolution equations for which we need to analyze the properties of the solutions for time evolution of the system. As the first step, we should understand the dynamics of their traveling wave solutions. There exists an enormous literature on the study of nonlinear wave equations, in which exact explicit solitary wave, kink wave, periodic wave solutions and their dynamical stabilities are discussed. To find exact traveling wave solutions for a given nonlinear wave system, a lot of methods have been developed. What is the dynamical behavior of these exact traveling wave solutions? How do the travelling wave solutions depend on the parameters of the system? What is the reason of the smoothness change of traveling wave solutions? How to understand the dynamics of the so-called compacton and peakon solutions? These are very interesting and important problems. The aim of this talk is to give a more systematic account for the bifurcation theory method of dynamical systems to find traveling wave solutions and understand their dynamics for two classes of singular nonlinear traveling systems.