THE COMPLEXITIES & DANGERS OF CHANGE OF SCALE presented by Rick Luttmann, Sonoma State University professor emeritus

Why do small animals and birds hibernate or fly south for the winter? Why do raindrops just get your head wet, but hailstones injure you? Why are our lungs and intestines so complex? Why do model railroaders face intractable difficulties in making their models look realistic? Why do animals huddle together for warmth when they don’t generate more heat together than apart? Why are the Lilliputians (little people) and Brobdingnagians (giants) of Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” impossible? Why do glaciers exist for thousands of years, but the ice cubes in your drink melt in under an hour? Why do large fires generate hurricane-force winds, sucking everything nearby into the flames? These, and many other similar questions, can be answered by considering the variation in the volume ratio to area as a function of scale.

In Person: Darwin 103, Virtual: bit.ly/SP24_math_talks

For more information, including the complete list of this semester's speakers, visit our website: https://math.sonoma.edu/math-colloquium.