2011 AMSI Lecturer Tour: A complex life

Speaker: Darren Crowdy

Affiliation: Imperial College London

Time: Monday 14/02/2011 from 11:00 to 12:00

Venue: Access Grid UWS. Presented from Parramatta (EB.1.32), accessible from Campbelltown (26.1.50) and Penrith (Y239).

Abstract: “But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.”

The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman

Imaginary, or complex, numbers have long fascinated not just mathematicians but the public at large; it is bemusing and intriguing that an “imagined” abstraction can have real-life utility. At a time when the teaching of complex analysis to undergraduate engineers, and even to undergraduate mathematicians, is arguably in decline I will present evidence, drawn mainly from my own research interests, that complex analysis continues to be an indispensable mathematical tool with perennial relevance to modern day applications in science and engineering.

Biography:

Prof. Crowdy holds a Chair in Applied Mathematics at Imperial College London and has been on the faculty of the Department of Mathematics since 1999. His interests are broad but centre on the application of methods of complex analysis to problems arising in the physical sciences, applied mathematics and mathematical physics. He has special interests in the field of fluid dynamics.

Prof. Crowdy is currently an Advanced Research Fellow of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and is pursuing a research project on function theory in multiply connected domains and its application to physical systems.