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Growth models in the plane
Colloquium| Speaker: | Stefan Steinerberger, University of Washington |
| Related Webpage: | https://faculty.washington.edu/steinerb/ |
| Location: | 1147 MSB |
| Start time: | Tue, Apr 22 2025, 4:10PM |
I will discuss the growth of (two-dimensional) things: e.g., think about lichen growing on a tree, which tends to be sort of round. By contrast, another fun example is electricity propagating through wood, which tends to be fractal. A famous and still very mysterious model is called Diffusion-Limited Aggregation (DLA), which forms the most beautiful fractal patterns - pictures will be provided. Despite this, DLA is poorly understood and I will survey the little that is known about it. I will then discuss a new type of growth model that behaves similarly, and which can be precisely analyzed.
The talk will assume no prior knowledge, and there will be lots of pictures and open problems.