Events
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Texas Tech University
Dr. Conover recently retired after 50 years as a Professor of Statistics at Texas Tech, more than 40 years of this as a Paul Whitfield Horn Professor. During this time he served on many Horn Professor selection committees. In this lecture he describes what those committees looked for in their selection.
This Departmental Colloquium is sponsored by the Statistics seminar group.
Ever since Poincare' times, understanding the qualitative behavior of a system is one of the main goals of Dynamical Systems' theory. The points with the simplest dynamics are those belonging to periodic orbits. The concept of 'periodic' was then generalized to 'recurrent' (a point x is recurrent if its orbit gets arbitrarily close to x as t->infinity), 'non-wandering' (a point x in non-wandering if, arbitrarily close to x, there are orbits that get back close to x for t->infinity) and more sophisticated types. Since Smale showed that the non-wandering set decomposes into basic 'pieces', each piece being the analogue of a 'periodic orbit', the decomposition of the non-wandering set became an important ingredient of the qualitative study of a dynamical system. This decomposition, though, does not say anything about the behavior of points outside of the non-wandering set. In this talk Jim Yorke and I present a complementary ingredient to encode the full behavior of a dynamical system into a graph. The nodes of the graph are the pieces of the decomposition above; its edges describe the dynamics of all other points. The exposition will be mainly based on examples and pictures.
This Departmental Colloquium is sponsored by the Applied Math seminar group and may be attended Wednesday the 31st at 4:00 PM CST (UT-6) via this Zoom link.
Meeting ID: 944 4492 2197
Passcode: applied