Predicting the future by solving equations

Abstract: Humans have sought to predict the future for as long as we have existed. One of the key ideas of the scientific revolution was that we can predict the future of physical systems by writing down the laws of physics as differential equations and solving them. Our capacity to do this has recently increased dramatically due to better computers, and better algorithms. This technology has quietly revolutionised industrial civilisation in countless ways, from predicting the weather a week in advance, to designing space planes without wind tunnels, and to understanding the gravitational waves detected by LIGO. In this lecture I will review this subject, discuss some of my own contributions, and mention some important open problems in the field.

Computer scienceMathematics

Audience: researchers in the topic

Modelling of materials - theory, model reduction and efficient numerical methods (UNCE MathMAC)