Time

Feb 21 2006 - 3:30pm

Location

JR 139

Speaker

Reinhard Laubenbacher (Virginia Tech)

Abstract

Ever since John von Neumann's attempt to understand properties of self-replicating organisms through the invention of cellular automata, time- and state-discrete models have played an important role in biology, physics, engineering, and computer science. Boolean networks and Petri nets are extensively studied examples. An important and largely unsolved problem is to understand the relationship between model structure and the resulting dynamics. This talk will present a discussion of this problem in the broader context of (time-discrete) dynamical systems over finite fields. After a survey of existing results and approaches, the talk will conclude with a collection of open problems.