Francis
Poulin,
Department
of
Applied
Mathematics
University
of
Waterloo
Years ago I co-designed a course called Environmental Informatics, AMATH/EARTH 310, which has since disappeared. The idea of this course was to bring applied math and earth science students together to learn about problems that overlap these two fields. One topic that I taught was chaos.
First, I showed them how the Lorenz model was a simplification of the Navier-Stokes equations. Then, we looked at numerical solutions to the Lorenz model to try and understand the different behaviours that can occur, which includes chaos. The two types of plots that one might consider are time-series and phase portraits but these do not make it easy to identify whether a solution is truly chaotic. Instead, we look at the power spectrum of the solution, which identifies chaos much more easily.
In this talk I will happily share my experiences in teaching this material and what I have learned from it.