The 2024 Serge Lang Undergraduate Lecture will be given on Wednesday October 9th by Professor Stefan Steinerberger, University of Washington.
MUSA and the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, present
Title: Growth models in the plane
Abstract. We'll study the growth of (two-dimensional) things. Think about lichen growing on a tree, it tends to be sort of round. Another fun example is electricity propagating through wood, it tends to be sort of fractal. A famous and still very mysterious model is called DLA: it forms the most beautiful fractal patterns (pictures will be provided). Despite this, DLA is actually fairly poorly understood and we will quickly survey the existing ideas, unfortunately there aren't very many. We will then discuss a new type of growth model that behaves similarly and which can be precisely analyzed. No prior knowledge is necessary and there will be lots of pictures and open problems!
Bio. Stefan Steinerberger is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington, Seattle. He received his undergraduate degree from the Johannes Kepler University Linz in Austria and earned his PhD from the University of Bonn. He had postdoctoral positions at Bonn and Yale and likes problems in mathematical analysis but also has dabbled in probability theory, spectral theory, applied mathematics, economics and one very fun project in psychology. His research has been supported by the NSF, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Institute of New Economic Thinking.