The end of theory?

This is an adaptation of a radio episode from the NPR program Engines of Our Ingenuity. It was inspired by a recent article in Wired on the program eureqa which "discovered" Newton's laws of motion - are Dynamical Systems' analysts becoming obsolete?

The Fourth International Conferenceon Recent Advances in Applied Dynamical Systems

Jinqiao Duan reports from the conference, June 16-20 2010, at Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, China.

The future of higher education

State funding for public universities and the proportion of tenure/tenure-track faculty at institutions of higher learning is decreasing. Here are some thoughts and a collection of links that deal with the future of our profession.

The future of Snowbird

The bi-annual meeting of our AG will take place in Snowbird, Utah, this spring. The 2015 meeting will also be held there, but the location of the 2017 meeting has not been decided yet. One option is, obviously, for the AG to renew its contract with Snowbird and continue a tradition that started twenty years ago. However, over the years the character, scope and size of the meeting have changed, and some feel that the expiry of the current contract is a good opportunity to look for alternatives. Since this is a matter that affects most of our members, the DSWeb Magazine team will use the Editorial to open a discussion, in the hope that some concensus can be found in May.

The International Workshop on Bifurcation Theory and Applications

In May 23-26 this year, the Department of Mathematics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai P.R. China hosted the International Workshop on Bifurcation Theory and Applications.

The London Millennium Footbridge Revisited: Emergent Instability Without Synchronization

Beleykh and colleagues give evidence that Millennium Bridge instability may not have arise via synchronization using dynamical models and data.

The Many Behaviours of a Fourth Order Thin-film Equation

Michael C. Dallaston from the Queensland University of Technology discusses the variety of solution behaviors found in a fourth-order thin film equation that serves as a somewhat prototypical equation for a collection of nonlinear phenomena.

The Mathematics of Poverty, Inequality, and Oligarchy

Boghosian and Börgers extend the "yard-sale model" of economics to account for oligarchy in wealth distribution.

The MEC Lab at the University of Delaware

The University of Delaware MEC lab uses modeling, experiment, and computation to teach students applied math. The lab consists of a number of faculty working in a variety of loosely connected fields of applied math. It incorporates graduate students working on research, undergraduate students taking part in a capstone course or a summer research program, and outreach programs for local high schools.

The Moser, Crawford and Red Sock winners of 2013.

An overview of the Moser, Crawford and Red Sock winners of 2013.

The Operator is the Model

Igor Mezić provides an overview of Koopman operator theory and describes how it can be used to extract human-interpretable models.

The Pancreatic Beta Cell: Biology and Mathematics Advance Together

Sherman and colleagues trace the history of using dynamical systems methods to model pancreatic beta cells and insulin secretion.

The Quadfurcation

Quadfurcation is a bifurcation when four fixed points are created from none at a single location in phase space upon variation of one parameter. This bifurcation is not at all well studied in dynamical systems literature. In this paper Bäcker and Meiss put forth that the quadfurcation is an organizing center for the dynamics of a four-dimensional map, the quadratic diffeomorphism introduced by Moser in 1994.

The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of Catastrophe Theory

In the 2009 Moser Lecture, titled “Catastrophes, Symmetry-Breaking, Synchrony-Breaking,” Golubitsky surveyed the rise, fall, and legacy of catastrophe theory. In particular, he showed how some of the ideas of catastrophe theory can be applied to study the dynamics of networks.

The Sydney Dynamics Group

The Sydney Dynamics Group is a recently formed research collaboration between two major universities in Sydney, Australia. The group consists of eight faculty, fourteen students, four postdocs, and a regular string of international visitors, all fueled by Sydney's outstanding coffee.