Distinguished Lecture - Chaos, Chance and Randomness: From Butterflies to Quantum Kinetics
- Date & Time
- May 11, 2022 (Wednesday) | 4-5pm (HKT)
- Venue
- ZOOM online lecture (https://bit.ly/3qE8KzA)
- Speaker
- Professor Jens MARKLOF
Dean of the Faculty of Science and Professor of Mathematical Physics, University of Bristol
The butterfly effect – “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” (Lorenz 1972) – is a popular illustration for extreme instability in chaotic systems such as our atmosphere.
In this lecture, Professor Jens MARKLOF will explain that, perhaps unexpectedly, the butterfly effect can also be used as a mathematical tool to understand relationships between physical laws on vastly different length scales. Helpful chaos! Professor Marklof will focus on some exciting recent developments in the kinetic theory of gases that can be traced back to the ground-breaking ideas of Maxwell and Boltzmann over a century ago. This is a non-technical lecture which he hopes will be entertaining to anyone with a science background.
Playback video:
Speaker Professor Jens MARKLOF
Dean of the Faculty of Science and Professor of Mathematical Physics, University of Bristol
Professor Jens Marklof is Professor of Mathematical Physics and Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Bristol. He graduated from Hamburg (Dipl-Phys 1994) and Ulm (PhD 1997), and held research fellowships at Princeton University, Hewlett-Packard, the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifique and the Laboratoire de Physique Theorique et Modeles Statistiques near Paris. He joined Bristol in 1999 and served as Head of Pure Mathematics, School Director for Postgraduate Research and Head of the School of Mathematics. Marklof's areas of expertise include dynamical systems and ergodic theory, quantum chaos, and the theory of automorphic forms. He delivered a plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematical Physics in Prague 2009 and was an invited section speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul 2014. Major awards include an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship 2001-06, Philip Leverhulme Prize 2004, Marie Curie Excellence Award 2004, Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award 2009-14, LMS Whitehead Prize 2010, Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2010-12, and an ERC Advanced Grant 2012-17. In 2015 Marklof was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of sciences.
