event
Tuesday 17 Mar 2020: Mathematics Colloquium: From spiders to elliptic curves
Paul Glendinning - University of Manchester
Harrison 103 14:00-15:30
One of the joys of dynamical systems is that it allows you to think about a broad variety of problems. I will illustrate this by looking at piecewise smooth systems which arise in models of spiders on their webs and children on playground swings, and then change tack completely to talk about the dynamics induced by the addition operation for points on elliptic curves. In the former case I will show that most children are safe on most swings (in the sense that they cannot make the swing go 'over the top') and in the latter that a related dynamical system is remarkably independent of the parameters of the underlying elliptic curves (a restricted rigidity result).
