Physics 313:   Advanced Topics in Nonlinear and Complex Systems
Fall Semester, 2008

Professor Henry Greenside

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First row, left to right: Stress chains in a two-dimensional granular medium of polystyrene disks (Bob Behringer's lab); colony of starving bacteria (Eshel Ben-Jacob's group); pattern of sparse vegetation in a desert; social network graph of the mathematician Paul Erdos, who had 507 coauthors (see this site for more information).

Second row, left to right: Aggregration stage of the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideium; sand dunes on Mars (see this link for further information); orientation preference map based on optical imaging of intrinsic signals in tree shrew visual cortex (see Bosking et al, J. of Neuroscience 17(6):2112-2127 (1997), from the Fitzpatrick neurobiology lab at Duke); temperature variations of the cosmic microwave background, revealing structure in the universe when it was a 1000 times smaller and about 300,000 years old (see the web page of the Boomerang experiment ).

Third row, left to right: Transition from laminar to complex dynamics as water flows from the left in an Aspen Colorado stream (picture by H. Greenside); SOHO picture of the Sun with its granular structure and a large plasma prominence (see this link for further information); spiral defect chaos state in a shallow horizontal convecting fluid layer (Eberhard Bodenschatz's group); computer simulation by Alain Karma and collaborators of three-dimensional dendritic growth in an undercooled melt.