2010 program of study : swirling and swimming in turbulence

Swirling and Swimming in Turbulence was the theme at the 2010 GFD Program. Professors Glenn Flierl (M.I.T.), Antonello Provenzale (ISAC-CNR, Turin) and Jean-Luc Thiffeault (University of Wisconsin) were the principal lecturers. Together they navigated an elegant path through topics ranging from mixing protocols and efficiencies to ecological strategies, schooling and genetic development. The first ten chapters of this volume document these lectures, each prepared by pairs of this summer’s GFD fellows. Following on are the written reports of the fellows’ own research projects.Funding was provided by the Office of Naval Research under Contract No. N000-14-09-10844 and the National Science Foundation through Grant No. OCE 082463

Connectivity, Complexity and Catastrophe in Large-scale Systems

This book represents an approach to large-scale system modeling that is a challenging synthesis for the systems analyst, the operations research worker, the system theorist, the policy analyst, and the student of social systems. After pointing out that the mathematical form of a system description dictates the types of questions that can be asked and answered by the model, the author declares that "there is no such thing as a model system: there are many models, each with its own characteristic mathematical features and each capable of addressing a certain subset of important questions about the system and its operation". The book supports this point with examples from a wide spectrum of contexts (such as physics, economic activity, water-resource management, ecology, transportation, and physiology) viewed from the points of view of various models and theories (such as general system theory, control theory, graph theory, linear and nonlinear system theory, and catastrophy theory). Against this broad background, the book then considers in depth the relations to large-scale systems of the theories of connectivity, complexity, stability, catastrophy, and resilience