8:30 AM-9:15 AM
Room: Texas Ballroom B
Chair: Clint Dawson, University of Texas, Austin
Most earthquakes occur on systems of pre-existing cracks or faults in the earth and exhibit complex behavior including scaling, migration of seismicity and fault interaction. To understand such systems, geophysicists have constructed mathematical models of earthquake faults whose dynamics are, in general, driven and dissipative. Despite the apparent simplicity of these models they raise fundamental questions about the role of the interaction range in dynamical systems, the physics of metastable states and nucleation and the connection between geometrical and statistical mechanical descriptions of phase transitions. The speaker will discuss the origin of these models and their mathematical and physical properties.
William Klein
Physics Department, Boston University
MMD, 11/20/98