Title: Throwing Balls to Make Microscopic Waves

Abstract: A toy model for many physical systems such as traffic congestion and blood flow is given by putting particles on a line and moving them according to some random or deterministic rule. In this talk, we will first talk about the particles moving randomly with nearest neighbor interactions, which is known as an asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP). We will show a few different ways to encode the system, discuss some of the known macroscopic behaviors, and give a connection with nuclear physics. In the second part of the talk, we discuss a deterministic process known as the box-ball system. The box-ball system is a discrete version of the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation for waves moving in a thin channel and exhibits discrete analogs of many of the same (non-linear) phenomenon that the KdV solutions have. We conclude with some open problems about generalizations.

Profile: Travis Scrimshaw is an assistant professor at Hokkaido University whose research focuses on combinatorial aspects of representation theory, integrable systems, and stochastic processes. He is an active developer of the open-source mathematical software SageMath. He received his PhD in 2015 at the University of California, Davis under the supervision of Anne Schilling. Afterwards, he did postdocs at the University of Minnesota, the University of Queensland, and Osaka Metropolitan University (JSPS postdoc). Personal Website

Language: English, no interpretation.

Target audience: General audience / everyone at OIST and beyond.
Freely accessible to all OIST members and guests without registration.

This talk will also be broadcast online via Zoom:

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Meeting ID: 912 2757 8769
Passcode: 865492

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