17 Apr 2008; Mat-Nat Faculty (UiTø), room A228. Thursday 12:15-14:00

Martin Rypdal

"Modeling the temporal fluctuations in sandpiles".

In the first part of the lecture I will show some figures and animations to illustrate the complexity of dynamics in sandpile automata. I will then briefly explain several tools and techniques used by natural scientists working with complex systems. The concepts discussed include stochastic differential equations with colored noise, finite size scaling techniques, multi-fractals, multi-fractal scaling, structure functions and intermittency. This toolbox is then applied to the temporal fluctuations of the BTW and Zhang sandpile models. Results are compared with financial time series and data obtained from fluid simulations.