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Abstract:
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Reexploring convection and its various transitions to chaotic behavior were
the central themes of GFD 1981. Our principal lecturer, Dr. Edward A. Spiegel,
provided both a rich historical picture and stimulating hours at the current
frontiers of this topic. Before the summer was out his research lecture on
"A Tale of Two Methods" elegantly merged Pierre Coullet's canonical formalism
for studying dynamical systems in a central manifold and the more traditional
two-timing amplitude expansions near critical points. Other lecture sequences
on convection and its relation to simpler dynamical systems ranged from the
fine presentations of John Guckenheimer on bifurcation theory to Fritz Busse's
survey of his immense contributions to our understanding of nonlinear
convection. The list of other lectures found on the following pages attests
to our summer-long exposure to convection in the ocean, the atmosphere, the
earth's core and mantle, and in the sun. August brought lectures on new
observations of convection in the laboratories of physicists. Albert
Libchaber's precise experiments on the many routes convection can take to
turbulence, with parallel laboratory and numerical experiments described by
J. Gollub and E. Siggia, added much to our language of inquiry. |