This Friday, March 23 at 3:30pm, the Winter Women in Math lecture will be delivered by
Gerda de Vries of the University of Alberta. All are welcome to the talk; the title and abstract are below.
We will also be having a "meet and greet" with Gerda for female math students and faculty, 12pm-1:30pm in MC 5136 on Friday March 23. Lunch will be served. Please rsvp to
wim@math.uwaterloo.ca if you would like to join us for lunch with Gerda.
Abstract: We investigate the formation and movement of self-organizing collectives
of individuals in homogeneous environments. We review a hyperbolic system
of conservation laws based on the assumption that the interactions
governing movement depend not only on distance between individuals, but
also on whether neighbours move towards or away from the reference
individual. The inclusion of direction-dependent communication mechanisms
significantly enriches the model behavior; the model exhibits classical
patterns such as stationary pulses and traveling trains, but also novel
patterns such as zigzag pulses, breathers, and feathers. The same
enrichment of model behavior is observed when we include
direction-dependent communication mechanisms in individual-based models.*
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Barbara F. Csima
Associate Professor
Department of Pure Mathematics
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1
Phone: (519) 888-4567 Ext. 37596