Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Critical care is a branch of medicine concerned with the provision of life support or organ support systems in patients who are critically ill and require intensive monitoring. Such monitoring allows us to collect massive amounts of data (usually at the level of organ dynamics, such as electrocardiogram, but recently also at the level of genes). In my talk I’ll show several examples of how ideas from nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics can be applied for the analysis of these data in order to understand and eventually predict physiologic status of critically ill patients: (1) Heart beats, respiration and blood pressure variations can be viewed as a dynamics of a system of coupled nonlinear oscillators (heart, lungs, vessels). From this perspective, a live support devise (e.g. mechanical ventilator used to support breathing) acts as an external driving force on one of the oscillators (lungs). I’ll show that mechanical ventilator entrances the dynamics of whole cardiovascular system and leads to phase synchronization between respiration and heart beats. (2) Then I’ll discuss how fluctuation-dissipation theorem can be used in order to predict heart rate relaxation after a stress (e.g. treadmill exercise test) from the heart rate fluctuations during the stress. (3) Finally, I’ll demonstrate that phase space dynamics of leukocyte gene expression during critical illness and recovery has an attractor state, associated with immunological health.

An interesting problem in gas and fluid dynamics is to understand the behavior of vacuum states, namely the behavior of the system in the presence of vacuum. A particular interest is so called physical vacuum which naturally arises in physical problems. The main difficulty lies in the fact that the physical systems become degenerate along the boundary. I'll present the well- posedness result of 3D compressible Euler equations for polytropic gases. This is a joint work with Nader Masmoudi.

Pseudo-Anosov mapping classes on surfaces have a rich structure, uncovered by William Thurston in the 1980's. We will discuss the 1995 Bestvina-Handel algorithmic proof of Thurston's theorem, and in particular the "transition matrix" T that their algorithm computes. We study the Bestvina-Handel proof carefully, and show that the dilatation is the largest real root of a particular polynomial divisor P(x) of the characteristic polynomial C(x) = | xI-T |. While C(x) is in general not an invariant of the mapping class, we prove that P(x) is. The polynomial P(x) contains the minimum polynomial M(x) of the dilatation as a divisor, however it does not in general coincide with M(x).In this talk we will review the background and describe the mathematics that underlies the new invariant. This represents joint work with Peter Brinkmann and Keiko Kawamuro.

Gas-liquid transition is one of the most basic problem to study in equilibrium phase transitions. In the pressure-temperature phase diagram, the gas-liquid coexistence curve terminates at a critical point C, also called the Andrews critical point. It is, however, still an open question why the Andrews critical point exists and what is the order of transition going beyond this critical point. To answer this basic question, using the Landau's mean field theory and the Le Chatelier principle, a dynamic model for the gas-liquid phase transitions is established. With this dynamic model, we are able to derive a theory on the Andrews critical point C: 1) the critical point is a switching point where the phase transition changes from the first order with latent heat to the third order, and 2) the liquid-gas phase transition going beyond Andrews point is of the third order. This clearly explains why it is hard to observe the liquid-gas phase transition going beyond the Andrews point. In addition, the study suggest an asymmetry principle of fluctuations, which appears also in phase transitions in ferromagnetic systems. The analysis is based on the dynamic transition theory we have developed recently with the philosophy to search the complete set of transition states. The theory has been applied to a wide range of nonlinear problems. A brief introduction for this theory will be presented as well. This is joint with Tian Ma.