Traveling waves in lattices of coupled pendula

Friday, January 9, 2015 - 15:30 to 16:30
704 Thackeray Hall
Speaker Information
Mark Levi
Penn State University

Abstract or Additional Information

Chains of coupled pendula arise as models of several physical phenomena and exhibit rich and sometimes counterintutive dynamics (even the statics is highly nontrivial: analysis of the equilibria amounts essentially to the Aubry-Mather theory). I will review some old and some new results, and will pose some open problems.