Five years ago, the Dutch Mathematics Cluster "Nonlinear Dynamics of Natural Systems+" (NDNS+) was established `to disentangle how observed phenomena relate to underlying mechanisms and to make predictions about concrete systems'. The cluster funded new appointments, advisorships, workshops, colloquia, and many other activities which have created a buzz of activity around this common goal.

The fifth birthday celebration of NDNS+ lasted from April 13-16 2010 at EURANDOM, the European Institute for Statistics, Probability, Stochastic Operations Research and its Applications in Eindhoven, and was organised locally by Adrian Muntean and Mark Peletier.



A large part of the 60 participants ready to go for lunch.

Fitting to this location, and as part of the + in the cluster title, topics included statistics of genes and of particle systems as well as information theory, but went further into a broad variety of natural systems: from Bird song dialects, chemotaxis, population dynamics, neural dynamics and materials to quantum theoretic models and more abstract mathematical analysis. Participants also learned about math against infectious diseases, and the successes and failures to model the effect of drug treatment. The conference program lists all talks and links to abstracts and further to pdfs of the presentations for many talks.


 
Pictures with the organisers: (left) Mark looking at the remains of the birthday cake,
(right) Adrian offering his wisdom.

The busy schedule allowed for over 30 presentations and a memorable tour with dinner at the DAF museum. The evening was rounded up with an entertaining dinner lecture by Willi Jäger from Heidelberg, where among other things we learned that mathematics makes beautiful! ...from inside.



A DAF model on a family trip in the last century.