Supervisor: Dmitri Fedorov

Why can meteorologists only predict the weather a week ahead? Why can we not model the exact evolution of the solar system? These questions have puzzled scientists since the 19^th century, and an entirely new mathematical field, chaos theory, has been discovered to help answering them. In this colloquium, we’ll take a closer look at the concept of chaos, and why it appears. 

Many are probably familiar with the butterfly effect, which is the idea that small actions can have a great impact on a complex system. This is often imagined as a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon. While somewhat exaggerated, this is indeed one of the ingredients for generating deterministic chaos. The other ingredients are unsolvable equations and, surprisingly, fractals. In this presentation, we’ll try to explore the links between these concepts, and how they relate to chaos theory.