About:

This Mathematics Colloquium was part of the Modelling Diffusive Systems 2023: Theory & Biological Applications workshop at ICMS.

About the talk:

In many arid parts of the world, vegetation self-organises into spatial patterns on length scales of hundreds of metres. Attempts to reproduce this phenomenon in the laboratory have been uniformly unsuccessful, and thus mathematical modelling provides the primary means of understanding these patterns. The key ingredients are competition for water and the gradual spread of plants through seed dispersal, which is typically modelled by diffusion. This talk discussed the types of patterns that are predicted by these diffusion-based models, and the ways in which they can be studied mathematically. In particular the lecture showcased that detailed mathematical study can be used to infer the historical origin of vegetation patterns in the Sahel region of Africa.

About the speaker:

Jonathan Sherratt (he/him) has been Professor of Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University since January 1998. He was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge (1985-1988), followed by graduate work at the University of Washington. His doctorate from the University of Oxford (1991) was supervised by J.D. Murray, FRS and P.K. Maini, FRS. He did postdoctoral work at Oxford, and was a Lecturer (1994-1997) and then Senior Lecturer (1997) at the University of Warwick before moving to Heriot-Watt. Jonathan Sherratt's research area is mathematical biology. He works on the application of mathematics to ecology, cell biology and medicine. He has been awarded the Whittaker Prize (Edinburgh Mathematical Society), the Okubo Prize (Society for Mathematical Biology), the Adams Prize (University of Cambridge) and the Whitehead Prize (London Mathematical Society).