Internal Colloquium: Dr George Datseris (Exeter)

In this talk I wish to showcase two recent research projects I had the pleasure of being part of, that nicely bring together a wide variety of topics: dynamical systems analysis, stability, critical transitions, stochastic dynamics, timeseries analysis, and game theory. The first project concerns the very definition of stability of a dynamical system, and how to extend it. We use these extensions to then illustrate how they can be of benefit to the currently-active topic of research of critical transitions (tipping points). In the second project we explore the role of deterministic chaos underpinning evolutionary game theory. It has been a long-standing debate whether population fluctuations are primarily the result of deterministic chaos, or they are just a product of noise. We use a combination of a stochastic demographic model and nonlinear timeseries analysis to show that chaotic fluctuations can remain relevant in large but finite populations, which are inherent to stochastic models and empirical studies of population dynamics.