Seminar by Prof. Tadashi Tokieda: Chain reactions

2nd of Two Seminar Series by Tadashi Tokieda (Professor, Stanford University)
This lecture is open to the OIST researchers/community

Speaker:

Professor Tadashi Tokieda is the Director of Studies in Mathematics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and the Poincaré Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Stanford.  He grew up as a painter in Japan, became a classical philologist in France, and has been an applied mathematician in the US and Europe.  He is active in outreach in the developing world, especially via the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

Abstract of Talk:

To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  However, there turn out to exist in nature situations where the reaction seems neither equal in magnitude nor opposite in direction to the action.

We will see a series of experiments and movies, apparently more and more in violation of Newton's 3rd law, and give a fully analysis of what is happening, discovering in the end that the phenomenon is in a sense generic.  They keys are shock, singularity in the material property, and supply of `critical geometry'.