Digital Snowflakes

  • Janko Gravner | University of California, Davis

Six-sided ice crystals that fall to earth in ideal winter conditions, commonly known as snowflakes, have fascinated scientists for centuries. They exhibit a seemingly endless variety of shape and structure, and snowflake growth from molecular scales, with its tension between disorder and pattern formation, remains puzzling in many respects. With emphasis on computer-generated pictures and movies, the talk will review a few mathematical models of snow crystal dynamics, and discuss their contributions to mathematics and to understanding of real snowflakes.

(Joint work with D. Griffeath.)

Speaker Details

Janko Gravner is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis. He received his PhD in 1991 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research focusses on cellular automata, with emphasis on probabilistic problems. It is known that many cellular automata, most notably Conway’s Game of Life, are intractably complicated in the sense that they can simulate a Turing machine or a digital computer. At the same time, many cellular systems model physical processes such as phase transitions in materials (boiling and crystallization) and biological processes such as the spread of disease or organization of living cells. Many of these models are not of the intractably complicated type and seem to have predictable aggregate behavior. Professor Gravner strives to combine computer experiments with rigorous investigations to analyze such dynamics. His work with David Griffeath on modeling snowflakes has been featured by Science News and The Discovery Channel.

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Series: Microsoft Research Talks