May 05 - 06, 2005
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences

A medium with continuous diversity can be interpreted as an assemblage of various interacting open systems with smoothly differing qualities. Such a concept is clearly intrinsic to many natural systems. In fact, whenever the populations in a large aggregate can be distinguished by a few continuously varying characteristics, like size, color, personality, orientation, age, shape, resilience, physiology, rugosity, etc., one faces a mixture which, in the limit of a very large number of individuals, is endowed with a continuous diversity of species.
The main objective of the workshop is to bring together leading specialists in several fields of science, giving them a unique opportunity to learn and exchange new mathematical methods, models and ideas concerning continuous diversity, which have recently been developed in completely different contexts, yet being applied to problems which have a common mathematical structure. Topics to be addressed by the workshop include: granular media, structured populations and biodiversity, mechanics and thermodynamics of polycrystals, iceberg and sea ice dynamics, polymeric solutions, liquid crystals and electromagnetic media, chemical reactions in complex multicomponent (continuous) mixtures.