The McDowell lecture is an annual public lecture and we welcome everyone and in particular schools, alumni and current students. It is given in honour of the late Professor Coulter McDowell (former Head of Mathematics at Royal Holloway) and this event celebrates Professor McDowell’s achievements and contributions not only to Royal Holloway but also to the wider field of Mathematics.

This year's lecture is on Tuesday 8th November and will be in the Windsor Building.

Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (UCL)

Title: The Fractal Way, A Window Into Complexity Science

"More than the sum of its parts", or "more is different" is a way to describe complex systems. In this talk we will discover what this means, and we will discover the beautiful geometric patterns that they produce: fractals. These are everywhere in nature, we see them in leaves, we feel and see them in the snowflakes during winter, and we even eat them! We will see that we are also fractals, and that without realising it, we also construct them in our cities.

 

Elsa Arcaute is Professor of Complexity Science at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, and an Honorary Professor at Hong Kong University. She holds a masters and a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge. Before joining UCL to study urban systems, she developed research within the Complexity and Networks group at Imperial College, on processes of self-organisation in ant-colonies and social systems in general.

Please register here.