Outline of Prof. John Brindley's lectures:

Cod, climate and calculus: nonlinearity in the seas.

The world's oceans remain overwhelmingly the least known
and understood part of the biosphere. Only in the last 20 to 30 years has adequate data been available to develop realistic models of the physical and dynamical processes, and only now is reliable data beginning to be assembled on the biological and ecological regimes existing there.
Massively intensive (and expensive!) international research is currently under way, driven by our realization of the importance of ocean dynamics in climate modelling (climate depends crucially on the whole ocean-atmosphere coupled system), and of ocean biosystems both as carbon dioxide sinks (comparable in order of magnitude with the terrestrial forests) and as major food sources for half the world's population. I will spend about half the time discussing the main physical processes, and the (highly nonlinear) mathematical models used to illuminate and understand them. The other half will be spent on properties of dynamical models (equally nonlinear!) for aspects of the biological/ecological scene, which is much more tightly bound to its turbulent physical environment than is the case for terrestrial biosystems. To illustrate both aspects I will use some examples from recent research by myself and colleagues in which the framework of dynamical systems theory has been invaluable.