Graduate student seminar | Behaviour of Chemical Kinetics Systems

Wednesday, July 16, 2008 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Speaker

Matthew Johnston
University of Waterloo

Abstract

The mathematical modeling of chemical reaction systems is important to our understanding of industrial chemical reactors, cell biology, and enzyme pathways, among other things. Apart from practical applications, chemical kinetics models are capable of exhibiting a variety of complicated and unexpected behaviours - including periodicity, chaos, multistability, pattern formation, etc. - despite the relatively simplistic form of the governing system of differential equations. In this talk, an introduction to chemical kinetics models will be given followed by some discussion of the breadth of behaviours permitted under a variety of model assumptions. No knowledge of chemistry or chemical kinetics will be assumed. The talk should be accessible to anybody with a basic undergraduate understanding of differential equations/dynamical systems.