A one-day meeting on pattern formation and applications was held on Monday 17th December in DAMTP, Cambridge. This was the first in a series of four meetings with the general title `Patterns, Nonlinear Dynamics and Applications' (PANDA) sponsored by the LMS under a Scheme 3 grant. The grant-holder is Rebecca Hoyle (University of Surrey). Jon Dawes (University of Cambridge) and Alastair Rucklidge (University of Leeds) are supporters.
About 40 participants attended the meeting, including 15 research students. There were six contributions; two hour-long pedagogical lectures given by Michael Proctor and Ian Melbourne and four shorter talks by Gabriela Gomes, Andrew Soward, John Norbury and Razvan Satnoianu.
The lectures by Proctor and Melbourne focused on the Ginsburg-Landau equation; its derivation through an asymptotic expansion, applicability, dynamics and limitations, and also addressed mathematical questions which arise out of a rigorous derivation via a generalised Liapounov-Schmidt reduction. The shorter talks discussed related specific problems in epidemiology, fluid mechanics and both the theory and biological applications of reaction-diffusion equations. More details are available from http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/jhd1002/panda/
Three further meetings are planned in 2002, with the first of these taking place at the University of Leeds on 25-26 March, jointly with the `Transpennine Nonlinear Network'.