November 23-25, 2005 -- 3:30 p.m.  
                 
                Lai-Sang Young  
                (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences) 
                A mathematical theory of strange attractors 
              
              held at the Fields Institute
              Abstract:  
                Attractors play an important role in dynamical systems theory 
                as they capture the large-time behavior of many orbits. I will 
                report on some recent developments in the analysis of a class 
                of attractors. These attractors occur naturally. They are chaotic, 
                or "strange", in the sense that they have complex geometric 
                structures, and their dynamics are unpredictable, generating statistics 
                that resemble those from random stochastic processes.  
              The first lecture is an overview aimed at a general audience. 
                In the second hour, I will try to paint a geometric picture of 
                these attractors, and in the third, I will demonstrate how to 
                verify the existence of attractors of this type in several situations, 
                including periodically forced limit cycles and Hopf bifurcations 
                for ODEs and evolutionary PDEs. 
              Thematic Program Home page 
               
              The Fields Institute Coxeter Lecture Series (CLS) brings a leading 
                mathematician to the Institute to give a series of three lectures 
                in the field of the current thematic program. The first talk is 
                an overview for a general mathematical audience, postdoctoral 
                fellows and graduate students. The other two talks are chosen, 
                in collaboration with the organizers of the thematic program, 
                to target specialists in the field. 
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