Applied Mathematics Seminar

Nonlinear partial and ordinary differential equations that arise in mathematical physics generically have highly transcendental solutions. But some of these solutions have very simple asymptotic series expansions, unstable in solution space like the Lorenz butterfly of chaos theory, in certain limits. The trouble is that these series are typically divergent and it is very difficult to extract any information about the solutions from them. I will review the difficulties and some techniques for solving them.