Events

Dr. Steve Purdey of the University of Toronto argues that the emphasis on growth, which has been the focus of the world economy for over 200 years, is no longer sustainable in a world of increasing scarcity. He introduces the concept of steady-state economics (SSE) and highlights some of the socio-economic and political challenges involved in transitioning to a no-growth economic system.

Speaker: Mike Batty

While in the past, systems were often understood as static, controllable, and well-defined, new research reveals that many systems are chaotically dynamic and unclassifiable. In this seminar, Mike Batty of the University College London Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis explains how these new ideas are increasingly being applied to cities and are changing the ways in which we design and invent urban futures.

Professor Shreyas Sundaram of the University of Waterloo provides an overview of some recent approaches to analyzing the dynamics of information propagation in networks. He describes how tools from Markov chain theory, linear system theory, and structured system theory can be used to analyze global behaviour arising from a certain class of linear dynamics, and examine the effect of the network’s topology on its resilience to misbehaving agents.

Dr. Monica Cojocaru, associate professor of mathematics (University of Guelph), discusses her current research on the dynamic modelling approaches to population behaviour incorporating both objective and subjective decision factors. She presents a time-dependent extension of the standard, static model of consumer choice for differentiated products. Of central interest to her research is how consumers react to the introduction of a new product in the market.

Mark Hancock, assistant professor in the Department of Management Sciences (University of Waterloo), lectures on how people can start thinking of their bodies as an extension of the virtual world. He discusses studies that investigate human perception, and presents solutions that leverage people’s understanding of the physical world using examples such as an interactive table for sandtray therapy — a form of art therapy often used with children — and a technique for exploring 2D information as if it were on a virtual cloth.

Speaker: Sasha Gutfraind (University of Texas at Austin)
Applied Mathematics Colloquium

Speaker: Katherine Larson

Speaker: Michael Beeler

Speaker: Joshua Armstrong

Speaker: Steve Mock (WICI affiliate researcher)
Title: National identity and the liberal state in a post-growth economy