Meeting
Agenda Meeting
Agenda
Improv is a system for the creation of real-time behaviour-based animated actors. Improv provides authors with the tools necessary to create rich interactive worlds inhabited by believable animated actors. These actors can be distributed across a wide-area network, and respond to users and each other according to the personalities and moods given to them by the authors.
A solitary wave is a wave with a single hump that propagates without changing shape. The first documented observations of a solitary surface wave were made by John Scott Russell in 1934. It was not until 1895 that Korteweg and de Vries derived the now famous KdV equation which showed that these waves exist due to a balance of the competing effects of dispersion and nonlinearity. A further 70 years elapsed before Zabusky and Kruskal discovered that KdV solitary waves have a remarkable property: two waves may interact in a complicated nonlinear way but after the interaction they retain their original identities. This 'particle-like' behaviour prompted them to coin the name soliton for such waves. Following this discovery many further remarkable properties of the KdV equation were discovered including the existence of an infinite number of conserved quantities and the Inverse Scattering Transform (IST), a method to solve the nonlinear KdV equation. This is one of the most important developments in applied mathematics of this century. It has also had repercussions in many fields in pure mathematics. The KdV equation has been derived in many physical contexts including: stratified fluids, rotating fluids, ion-acoustic waves, plasma physics, and lattice dynamics. Several other nonlinear wave equations with important physical applications have been derived that have soliton solutions and an IST.
In this talk I will discuss a number of simple wave equations including the KdV equation. The properties of solitons and the KdV equation will be discussed and examples of spectacular solitary internal waves observed in the ocean and atmosphere will be shown.
Yes.
Probably a little less than would normally be indicated by a four-word noun stack.
Setting new records.
The abstract, exemplifying abstraction, abstracts from abstraction, defining abstract abstraction, from which abstraction follows by abstracting from exemplifying.