The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of Catastrophe Theory

In the 2009 Moser Lecture, titled “Catastrophes, Symmetry-Breaking, Synchrony-Breaking,” Golubitsky surveyed the rise, fall, and legacy of catastrophe theory. In particular, he showed how some of the ideas of catastrophe theory can be applied to study the dynamics of networks.

Crawford prize winners revisited: Björn Sandstede

The Crawford prize is awarded biannually since 2001 at the `Snowbird' conferences by the SIAM activity group on dynamical systems for recent outstanding work on a topic in nonlinear science. In a planned series of articles we invite the winners to write about their mathematical biography, their work, and what they consider important problems in the field of applied dynamical system. This article contains the contribution of the first prize winner Björn Sandstede.

Linear Partial Differential Equations and Fourier Theory

Reviewer: Charles H. Morgan, Jr.
Book Reviews editor

Welcome to academia after 30 years in industry

After 30 years of working at Harwell Laboratory in Oxfordshire, Andrew Cliffe left his position as a Senior Consultant with Serco Assurance for a Professorship at the University of Nottingham. Hinke Osinga asks him about the differences between working in a company and at a university and how he decided on his career path.

New directions in Dynamical SystemsDecember 7 - 11, 2009

A workshop on dynamical systems was held at the Lorenz Center in Leiden, Netherlands, December 7-11, 2009, in honour of Prof. Henk Broer's 60th birthday. The workshop covered many aspects of dynamical systems, but emphasized research areas of quasi-periodic motion, KAM theory, Hamiltonian systems, as well as bifurcation theory, applied analysis and numerical analysis, area in which Henk Broer has important contributions.

SIAG/DS election results

We introduce the new SIAG/DS team from the October 2009 elections for officers of the SIAM Activity Group in Dynamical Systems and thank those who participated in last fall's elections.

Differential Dynamical Systems

Reviewer: Oliver Junge
Technische Universität München

Homology: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Tools from the purportedly abstract field of algebraic topology are finding their way into applied mathematics, and Robert Ghrist of the University of Pennsylvania is helping lead the invasion. Ghrist and colleagues use ideas from homology to solve perplexing problems arising in sensor networks, helping to improve their coverage, robustness, and efficiency.

Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life

Reviewer: Stephen Schecter
North Carolina State University

Books in Brief

Books (and music) which caught our attention