13 August 2007

Day 1 of a 5 day meeting.

All talks on Monday to be held at the Law Faculty, Cambridge.

If you would like to attend this meeting, please contact Nicholas Watkins (nww@bas.ac.uk) for more information.

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The Natural Complexity programme of the British Antarctic Survey is organising a conference entitled “Natural Complexity – data and theory in dialogue” to take place on 13-17 August 2007 at the Law Faculty (13 August) and Clare College (14-17 August), Cambridge. Inspired by the question: “What use is complexity science to global environmental issues” the meeting aims to highlight the contribution that complexity theories are already making to high-priority problems in the earth system sciences and to present them with new challenges.

The Meeting will begin with a 1-day symposium at the Law Faculty introducing some topical earth-system problems, aspects of complexity, and intersection points between the two.

Themes throughout the following 4 days at Clare College will include:

Modern nonlinear time series analysis and dynamical systems

Beyond Brownian motion – random walks and anomalous diffusion

Collective phenomena – networks and extremes

Emergence, self-organisation, and pattern formation

The emphasis throughout the 5 days will be on the relationship of complexity theory to real-world observations and problems. We anticipate that both experts and non-experts in complexity will attend, so to aid dialogue each day will start with tutorials that collectively will cover some of the essential concepts and tools of complexity.