Aims & Scope

Processes in the natural environment or in living organisms differ intrinsically from those studied in the ‘hard sciences’. Classically, a physical or chemical process is reduced into one or more idealized building blocks which are subsequently studied in isolation, but modern developments in earth and life sciences where the underlying mechanisms interact in a nonlinear way have exposed the limitations of this approach.

The challenges posed by processes in the brain, in the cell, or in the atmosphere, to the theory of dynamical systems surpass those coming from more classical fields in richness, in magnitude and in difficulty. This leads to a deep cross-fertilization, because the mathematics of nonlinear systems itself is at a critical phase in its development as well.

Some of the central themes associated to the interaction between the mathematical theory of dynamical systems and the complex models of life and earth sciences include bifurcations and chaos, networks and delays, scientific computing, transient dynamics, multiple scales, patterns and waves. Moreover, probability models explicitly allow for indeterminism, and are highly suitable to model complicated processes in living cells, as well as the behaviour of organisms and populations that are their aggregates. At present the application of such models in the life sciences is a wide-open area. Such models are applied in the NDNS+ cluster to statistical genetics, epidemiology, analysis of high-dimensional data, modelling of networks, cell processes and population dynamics, and image analysis.

A detailed description of the Aims and Scope of the NDNS+ cluster is available as a PDF download.