CHAOS AND WEATHER

From cafes in Berkeley to Sequins in Brazil

Imagine that you are watching a leaf fall. it is impossible to predict something as simple as where it will go. Its motion is caused by a combination of deterministic and random underlying forces whose interactions produce complex and unexpected behavior in Nature such as strange weather patterns and the jiggling motion of a dust particle in a pool of water. Physicist Lisa Borland works with Sequin (Stochastic EQUation INference), a computer program that is used to identify the complex causal dynamics of such motions. Her goal is to develop a theory that can recover the underlying dynamics of an observed process evolving in time.