The Department of Chemical Engineering Presents:

A Window into Complexity: Simple Examples of Self-Organizing Systems

J.M. Ottino

Northwestern University

January 19, 2006


Science rests on the assumption that understanding of building blocks allows for the understanding of the entire system. This viewpoint has been remarkably successful. It is becoming clear, however, that there are limits to this approach and that complementary viewpoints are needed. Examples, in fact, may be humbling and there are many deceptively simple systems where interaction among the elementary building blocks no matter how well-understood does not even give a glimpse of the behavior of the global system itself. This puts us in the realm of complex systems. Much of the work in this area is computational; however, some of the toughest problems are suggested by experiments. Several physical examples will be presented, many extracted from the field of granular materials, before ending the talk with a general overview of complex systems and the tools needed to understand them.

Julio M. Ottinos Bio

Dr. Julio M. Ottino is currently Dean of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Northwestern University and holds the titles of Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He was the founder and co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems and was Chairman of the department of Chemical and Biological Engineering during 1992-2000. Ottinos research has appeared on the covers of and Nature, Science, and Scientific American, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US and has impacted fields as diverse as fluid dynamics, granular dynamics, microfluidics, geophysical sciences, and nonlinear dynamics and chaos. He is a Senior Advisor to Unilever, was a member of the Technical Board of Dow Chemical, and was a member of the International Review of Engineering in the UK. Dr. Ottino received several awards including the Alpha Chi Sigma Awardand William H. Walker of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers has given numerous named lectureships including the Lacey Lectures at Caltech, the Corrsin Lecture in Johns Hopkins and the Danckwerts Lecture in England, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.