This would be the first talk of the double-header on October 5th. ************************************************************ Speaker: Prof. Ferdinand Verhulst (University of Utrecht) http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~verhu101/ Time: Friday, 2-3PM, October 5, 2012 Room: OMB-149, Old Main Building (UNSW) Lunch with speaker: meet around 12:30PM at the entrance to the East Wing of Red Centre Building. One choice of commuting from Sydney: meet at Carslaw 620 around 12:05PM and share taxi to UNSW. The round trip is covered by school colloquium fund. ----------------------------------------------------- Title: Life and work of Henri Poincaré Abstract: Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) was one of the most prolific scientific authors of all times. Born and educated in Nancy he showed already very young a wide interest in literature, natural phenomena, geometry, politics and many other topics. When he was around twenty years old, he made a definite choice for mathematics, physics and astronomy. He pursued his education in Paris at the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines. For a brief period he was a mining engineer, but switched to a mathematics lecturing position in Caen (Normandy) and shortly afterwards to Paris where he taught mathematics, celestial mechanics and mathematical physics. Already famous among scientists, he became well-known to the general public by his books of philosophical essays published by Flammarion. It is remarkable that Poincaré started whole new fields: dynamical systems (with strong interaction between geometry and analysis), automorphic functions, topology; he was a founder of Special Relativity, together with Lorentz and Einstein. After surveying his achievements, we will discuss part of his work, in particular the Price Essay for King Oscar II which stands at the beginning of chaos theory and in general his contributions to dynamical systems theory. ----------------------------------------------------- Joint Colloquium web site: http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/SemConf/JointColloquium/index.html