Yesterday I was in Karlstad in Sweden to give a talk on the uses of mathematical modelling in the natural sciences. I was invited to do this by Claes Uggla and I was very happy to have the opportunity to present some of my ideas on this subject. The talk was structured as a series of examples involving applications of different mathematical techniques. Many of these examples have been discussed in some form in this blog during the past few years and indeed a lot of my ideas on the subject were developed in conjunction with the blog posts. The subjects were William Harvey and the circulation of the blood, multidrug therapy for HIV-AIDS, the lizard Uta stansburiana, oscillations near the big bang, Liesegang rings, modelling oscillations in vole populations using a reaction-diffusion system, signal transduction in T cells.
As well as presenting a variety of applications of different types of mathematics I also wanted to explain some mathematical connections between these subjects. One central idea is that structural stability is an issue of key importance in modelling natural phenomena. Most phenomenological models involve parameters or other elements which are not known exactly. Thus to be of interest for applications features of the dynamics of the model should be invariant under arbitrary small perturbations of the system. More precisely, if a model does not possess an invariance of this type but is nevertheless useful this requires some explanation. One possible source of an explanation is the presence of what I call ‘absolute elements’ in the model. For instance, in population dynamics if a population is zero at some time then it will definitely remain zero. This fact is independent of the details of how the population grows when it is non-zero. Similarly a spacetime singularity can define an absolute element in cosmology. When the spacetime metric breaks down this ends the dynamics in a way which is independent of the details of the dynamics of the matter away from the singularity. Thus structural stability can be weakened to the condition of invariance under small perturbations which leave certain submanifolds fixed. This can lead to the appearance of relevant heteroclinic cycles although these are not structurally stable in the absolute sense. It explains the appearance of heteroclinic cycles in the models for lizards and for the big bang in a unified way. In a similar way, restricting the perturbations of a system of chemical reactions to those which leave a particular reaction irreversible can furnish the homoclinic orbit needed to model Liesegang rings.
I have now put a slightly extended version of this talk with references on my web page. On the same day there was a talk by Bernt Wennberg on models for the collective motion of birds and fish, concentrating mainly on kinetic models related to the Boltzmann equation. At the start of his talk he showed some of the well-known pictures of flocks of Starlings over Rome. In the evening I had my own pleasant experience with a flock of birds. A large number of Jackdaws (a couple of hundred) were flying around the central square in Karlstad and calling. For some reason I have become increasingly attached to the Jackdaw over the years. At this point, and without a good excuse, I want to tell a story about Jackdaws from the book ‘King Solomon’s Ring’ by Konrad Lorenz. It is a long time since I read the book and so I hope I do not distort the story too much. At one time Lorenz was living in a small village in Austria where he was regarded by the locals as a bit crazy. One of his interests was the social life of Jackdaws. There were Jackdaws living on the roofs of the houses and he climbed up to get close to them. In order to fit in better with his black subjects he decided to dress in black. The only ‘suitable’ black clothing he could find was a devil’s costume left over from a fancy dress party. No doubt the spectacle of him climbing over the roofs dressed as the devil perfected his reputation with the local inhabitants.
Hydrobates 
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