|
Applied Math Seminar Two topics in Biology: Hearing and Plant Morphogenesis |
|
Hearing is the sense for which the input is perhaps easiest to characterize - air pressure as a function of time. Recent advances toward understanding the middle and inner ear will be discussed. The inner ear provides a real-time fourier analysis of the sound. How this occurs can be explained with an application of asymptotic methods to 3-D fluid-elastic waves. To make it interesting, there is nonlinearity involving a feed-back process that can have instabilities leading to ringing in your ear. A different topic is the pattern formation in plant growth. It seems likely that Turing's reaction-diffusion theory is not the correct explanation. Instead there is considerable evidence that the mechanism is due to mechanical instability of the growth surface. |