Mathematics in Nature

Mathematics in Nature

Reviewer: Björn Sandstede, Brown University

Finding Appropriate Dynamics for the Social Sciences

Finding Appropriate Dynamics for the Social Sciences

The growing area of "mathematical social sciences" has provided valued insights for several disciplines, but a key aspect of this development desperately needs help from mathematicians who are skilled in dynamical systems. Namely, although "change" obviously is a central feature for all of the social sciences, it is not clear how it should be modeled. Indeed, in a real sense, this article is a call for help; it is an appeal for more people from the dynamical systems community to become involved. What makes the challenge attractive is that, once the appropriate dynamics are discovered, they most surely will involve features that differ from what we currently see in the literature. To introduce what causes some of the complexities of these areas, results and difficulties associated with price dynamics are described. As it will become clear, much less is known about how prices change than the reader might have expected.

The cat's cradle, stirring, and topological complexity

The cat's cradle, stirring, and topological complexity

There are several physical situations in which the tangling of a loop is relevant: the game of cat's cradle is a simple example, but a more important application involves the stirring of a fluid by rods. Here we discuss how elementary topology constrains the types of mappings that can occur on a surface, for example when the surface is the domain of a two-dimensional fluid.

Books in Brief

Books in Brief

Books which caught our attention.

International Conference on Infinite Dimensional Dynamical Systems

International Conference on Infinite Dimensional Dynamical Systems

Eighty participants attended the International Conference on Infinite Dimensional Dynamical Systems, Fall, 2008 at York University, Toronto. The conference was in honor of the 70th birthday of George R. Sell of the University of Minnesota.

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