Mathematics and Statistics

Colloquium
Some results on Nicholson’s blowflies equations

Yuming Chen (Wilfrid Laurier University)

Tuesday, January 7, 2014 at 2:30 pm

Tilley Hall Room 309

Data drawn from the comprehensive and elegant experiments performed by Nicholson on laboratory cultures of the sheep blowfly are used as illustrative examples of oscillatory population fluctuations in numerous elementary ecology texts. To model this phenomenon, Gurney et al. proposed a model described by a delay differential equation. This model and its modifications, referred to as Nicholson’s blowflies equations, have also been used to describe population growth of other species and hence have been extensively and intensively studied. In this talk, we present some results on these equations. Most of them are related to stability. First, we consider the local dynamics. Then we consider the effects of spatial diffusion. The main part is our recent work on global dynamics of delayed reaction-diffusion equations in unbounded domains.

Yuming Chen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Wilfred Laurier University