Matteo Smerlak — Aspects of Evolutionary Dynamics From Viruses to Whales

Our interdisciplinary group studies ecological and evolutionary dynamics across scales. In this video I present a selection of recent results that illustrate the role of mathematics in furthering our understanding of biological evolution:

1. a formalization of the concept of “selection” which highlights its analogy with extreme value statistics;
2. a mapping between positive linear systems and Markov processes on graphs, with applications to the prediction problem in viral evolution;
3. stability results for Lotka-Volterra type systems rooted in newly discovered macro-ecological scaling relations.